'I have carefully reviewed the film Stolen with a view to assessing whether it is reasonable to accept the assertions of the film... It is my opinion that the film Stolen portrays a situation of enslavement within the refugee camps of the Western Sahara.'

Dr. Kevin Bales - President

Free The Slaves

Dr. Kevin Bales

'Asim and I are of the opinion that the practices described in the interviews are consistent with slavery as it is practised in neighbouring Mauritania and that the interviewees are credible... It is also a common practice for states to put pressure on victims to retract their statements.'

Romana Cacchioli - Africa Programme Co-ordinator

Anti-Slavery International

Anti-Slavery International

'In sum, credible sources testified to HRW about vestiges of slavery that continue to affect the lives of a portion of the black minority in the Tindouf camps... The issue of slavery in the Tindouf camps deserves closer scrutiny than Human Rights Watch has been able to undertake.

Eric Goldstein - Research Director in the Middle East and North Africa division

Human Rights Watch - Slavery

Human Rights Watch – Slavery

US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants

Stolen is a surprising documentary. It starts as an intimate family drama in the admittedly heightened ambient tension of life in a refugee camp. The filmmakers many days of constant taping, however, eventually render them "hiding in plain sight," which allows the audience to be as a fly on the wall when an unexpected mystery begins to unfold. Sotto voce conversations caught off tape, the mute testimony of dry documents, the unspoken rationales of unyielding bureaucrats--all begin to accumulate to provide evidence, all the more credible for its banal circumstances and delivery, of what would otherwise be difficult to believe in the twenty-first century. Even activists who have been fighting against forced encampment (aka, human warehousing) as the all-too-often default fate of refugees for decades on end will be shocked. I thought I had seen it all. I hadn't.

Merrill Smith - Director of International Planning and Analysis for the USCRI