Nouakchott – More than 800 people participated in the celebration of International Migrants Day on December 18, 2019 in the cities of Nouakchott, Nouadhibou, Néma and Sélibaby in Mauritania.

Under the theme of "Social Cohesion", the International Organization for Migration (IOM) organized International Migrants Day to highlight the contributions of migrants and people on the move in Mauritanian society.

In Mauritania, the celebration coincided with the festivities of the Global Migration Film Festival (GMFF), organized in more than 100 countries around the world.

The aim of the festival is to promote films that best capture the realities of migration, as well as the unique contributions made by migrants in their new communities.

Three young Mauritanian directors/journalists and their films were represented this year: Aliya Abass, Mouhamed Abdou from the Slice-up/FRAME collective and Moctar Yahya, a journalist/producer are young filmmakers who have made short films with their smartphones, capturing the beauties of migration through inspiring life stories of migration in Mauritania.

Through her work chronicling the life of a Senegalese migrant living in Mauritania, Aliya Abass hopes to "bring down the iron curtain" by showing the positive side of migration. "I just wanted to tell a positive story but the truth is that there are millions of stories like that", she said.

These "millions of stories" also inspired El Moktar Mohamed Yahya, the filmmaker and director of the film Liberthé. "Integration goes beyond a particular language or a particular way of dressing. It's a deeper feeling" he explains.

"Migration is a predominant phenomenon in the formation of our civilizations. All cultures are made up of learning. In my film, I try to show that after a certain time, Lebanese cuisine, which the subject of my film, will no longer be in 10, 20, 100 years, a Lebanese cuisine but a Mauritanian cuisine. It's a question of time and perspective," says Mohamed Abdou, director of the film La cuisine migrante.

The celebrations were organized in collaboration with the Ministry of Employment, Youth and Sports.

For more information, please contact Ciré Ly, Communications Assistant at IOM Mauritania. Email: caly@iom.int