Abstract
This article examines the ways in which Sons of the Clouds: The Last Colony, the 2012 documentary directed by the Spanish filmmaker Alvaro Longoria and produced by the Spanish actor Javier Bardem, makes use of celebrity activism and diplomacy in order to reach an international audience and directly pressure the United Nations to intervene in what the film frames primarily as a question of human rights and freedom from oppression. Despite Senator Edward Kennedy’s sympathy to the Sahrawi cause and the attention devoted to it by the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights, it was a little-known issue in the U.S. before Bardem began to talk about it on a variety of talk and news shows while promoting the James Bond thriller Skyfall (2012). Michael Renov has argued that, although we generally think of documentary in terms of social activism and the discourses of sobriety, desire and the unconscious may play an important role in this genre as well. In this case, Bardem’s ‘sex appeal’ draws viewers to his viewpoint, and his considerable fame within the English-speaking media world, in which actors are expected to share personal tidbits as they pitch their latest projects, gives him a platform to present this issue as an extension of his charming persona.
Highlights
The human rights and colonialist issues associated with the long-standing unresolved conflict over Western Saharan nationality and self-governance might bring to mind the excesses of apartheid South Africa, the struggle of Sahrawis has most often been compared to that of Palestinians.2 In both cases, it has been argued, a stateless people is divided, living under the military authority of a foreign nation in what it considers its own territory or in a refugee area likewise subject to military intervention, and both occupations were carried out at least in part through the settlement of civilians in the disputed region
Sons of the Clouds represents a collaboration among many “Spanish film people” who are all responsible for its success—Bardem and Longoria, and narrator Elena Anaya and the many other prominent figures who appear throughout5—it is this narrative about Bardem’s growing understanding of the Sahrawis’ human warmth and political plight, as well as his attempts to intervene in defense of their human rights, that becomes the organizing axis of the film and the key to viewers’ sympathetic response
As Bardem wrote in his response to questions from the Spanish daily El País in February 2013, “In the coming months, we will hold viewings of the documentary at United Nations headquarters in Geneva and New York, in the U.S Congress, in the Australian Parliament, and we will continue showing it at international festivals” (n.p., qtd. in Belinchón; my translation)
Summary
The human rights and colonialist issues associated with the long-standing unresolved conflict over Western Saharan nationality and self-governance might bring to mind the excesses of apartheid South Africa, the struggle of Sahrawis has most often been compared to that of Palestinians.2 In both cases, it has been argued, a stateless people is divided, living under the military authority of a foreign nation in what it considers its own territory or in a refugee area likewise subject to military intervention, and both occupations were carried out at least in part through the settlement of civilians in the disputed region.
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