26 Jun 2009
The documentary Stolen created a storm at the Sydney Film Festival when its central character claimed she had been falsely portrayed as a slave. Now, a UNHCR spokeswoman says her interview for the film was also manipulated
Fetim Sellami immediately reminded me of the strong, gracious women I had met in the Western Sahara refugee camps in 2004 when I toured there with then-president of the NSW Upper House, Meredith Burgmann. Sitting on Burgmann’s couch in inner city Glebe — where she stayed while in Sydney — Sellami chatted happily in Hassaniya with her husband and smiled at our clumsy attempts to communicate.
However, when asked about her experience with Australian filmmakers Violeta Ayala and Dan Fallshaw, her demeanour darkened…..(cont.).

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Tony Iltis, Green Left Weekly, 21 June 2009

Saharawi refugee and preschool teacher Fetim Sellami is a central character in the Australian documentary Stolen, a film set in the refugee camps in south-west Algeria that have been home to 165,000 Saharawi refugees since their country, Western Sahara, was invaded by Morocco in 1975.
However, when she and her husband, Baba Hocine Mahfoud, attended its June 11 premiere at the Sydney Film Festival, they did not receive red carpet treatment, despite the long distance they had travelled.

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ABC 7.30 Report
Monday, June 15, 2009 8:35 AEST

A bitter dispute has erupted over the accuracy of a taxpayer-funded feature documentary screened at the Sydney Film Festival. The film, called ‘Stolen’, features the story of Fetim Sellami and her family, who live in a refugee camp in the Algerian Sahara Desert. Fetim Sellami has been flown to Sydney by the independence movement that runs the camp, to enable her to denounce her depiction in the documentary as a slave, and the allegation that such slavery is widespread in the camps.

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