Carolina De Lillo Magliulo

In the 1990s, an eight-year-old girl, Carolina, is traveling in a desert. There she meets the Saharawi, a people of exiles, chased out of their own land. In the refugee camps, the Saharawi believe that they will shortly be returning home, thanks to the referendum that will restore the Western Sahara, largely occupied by Morocco, to their own people. One day, as Carolina trudges through the dunes, a wind comes up and sweeps her into the future. Thirty years later: it’s still Carolina, but she’s an adult. She’s back in the same desert: the children she once knew are now young men and women, and new generation has replaced them: children who have just returned from Naples, which had taken them in, far from the desert, in a journey in the opposite direction. As past meets present, a painful truth sinks in: the referendum longed for by the Saharawi has turned into a mirage, and hope is dwindling in the face of new prospects, all of them troubling.