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DESERT PHOSfate is an experimental documentary film by Sahrawi artist Mohamed Sleiman Labat. It weaves through the story of phosphate, exploring the multi-layered narrations about connections to land, sand particles, plants, human and mineral displacement. The film explores ways of telling about realities, metaphors and poetics in the desert. It highlights connections between ecological justice, colonial practices, environmental violence, traces of anthropocentric mineral extractions, and the loss of indigenous ways of knowing and telling about the world. This film and story are told from the perspective of a Saharawi artist. It doesn’t attempt to follow conventional western film methods or structures, Saharawi artist Mohamed Sleiman hopes to tell this story in a different way. The film is based on narratives and philosophies rooted in the Sahrawi way of living. It’s important to bring up indigenous ways of telling stories with metaphors, dream telling and fables. Such poetic and nonlinear methods from the Sahrawi perspective can better tell the story of the Sahrawi. PHOSfate is a poetic rhyming combination of phosphate and fate referring to the fate, destiny, current and future impact of phosphate on the Saharawi community, on global economies and global ecosystems. Sleiman Labat’s film consists of five chapters of different lengths and points of view, they do not follow any logical or chronological order but they somehow randomly connect and reconnect at some point or another. This nonlinear method of narrating is the artist’s way of decolonizing his methods of telling the story. By incorporating elements from his surroundings and context, he is basing his story on elements from his life. The chapters inconsistency resembles the sandstorm rhythms; it builds up and collapses several times, then it roars loudly again before it winds down to a deathly silence and then back to roaring again. And that sets the tone for the entire film.
