EXCLUSIVE: Lightdox has acquired world sales rights to the documentary My Home of Wind and Sand ahead of its world premiere Tuesday at the Zurich Film Festival.

Filmmaker Patrick Wally spent over a decade on his film, a portrait of women’s rights, human rights and climate activist Najla Mohamed Lamin, who was born in a Sahrawi refugee camp in Algeria. Lamin has led a peaceful campaign supporting the right of Western Sahara to self-determination, a dream of Sahrawi refugees that has been frustrated for more than half a century.

Nobel Peace Prize nominee Greta Thunberg is expected to attend Tuesday’s world premiere and will participate in a conversation afterwards with Lamin. Thunberg visited the Sahrawi refugee camps last year, where she and Lamin conducted a workshop on climate change.

“Told through conversations with the filmmaker – who gradually becomes visible inside the story – the documentary refuses to reduce Najla to a symbol of a geopolitical conflict,” notes a synopsis. “Western Sahara is experienced through one person living its consequences in real time. Najla addresses international institutions, builds practical spaces for women and children, raises her family and continues to argue for peaceful resistance even as a generation born in exile grows older without a political resolution.”

The synopsis continues, “When armed conflict resumes after decades of ceasefire, the convictions that have shaped Najla’s public life are tested. The film follows her as she asks what pacifism, patience and agency can mean when history seems immovable – and whether one person can still create change inside circumstances that appear impossible.”

Anna Berthollet, CEO of Lightdox, commented, “Najla has lived her entire life with an unresolved conflict. Yet Patrick’s film is not a geopolitical story; it is an intimate portrait of how she chooses to live, raise her children and build a future for her community. He spent eleven years following her journey and bringing her story and mission to the screen. At a time when Western Sahara is once again receiving international attention, we believe it is important that Najla’s perspective is part of that conversation. We feel very humbled to have been entrusted with bringing Patrick and Najla’s deeply personal story to audiences around the world.”

The unresolved status of Western Sahara has been largely ignored in the U.S. and much of the West, but it has kept the Sahrawi people in terrible limbo. Spain ruled the territory as its colonial possession for the better part of a hundred years, but after it ceded claims in the mid-1970s, hopes for the territory to determine its own future were dashed when Morocco took control of much of Western Sahara. The Polisario Front, representing the Indigenous Sahrawi people, seeks self-determination and is supported by Algeria (where the refugee camps are located). The United Nations officially designates Western Sahara as a “Non-Self-Governing Territory.”

In a director’s statement, Wally said, “When I met Najla ten years ago, I knew this film needed to be made. At the time I had never heard of the issue of Western Sahara. I thought of myself as reasonably informed about the struggles shaping the world, yet I knew nothing about more than 200,000 Sahrawis living for generations in refugee camps in the Algerian desert, established after the war and displacement of 1975. That absence in my own awareness shocked me.

“What struck me first, however, was not the conflict in the abstract but Najla herself. I was surprised by my own assumptions. Here was a woman raised in a refugee camp who was exceptionally articulate, politically precise and full of a vision for the future. She spoke about peaceful resistance, about a generation born in the camps, and about the endurance required to believe in a bright future when nobody outside seems able to see it.”

Along with directing, Wally serves as the film’s cinematographer. The film is produced by Shirin Hooshmandi, Najla Mohamed Lamin, and Patrick Wally. Anna Kirst edited the film, with additional editing by Daniel Rutz. The music is by Ahmed Zain.

In addition to Tuesday’s world premiere at the Zurich Film Festival, My Home of Wind and Sand will hold public screenings on Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday.