i'll be so cool once i'm 70

Sahrawi campaigners and filmmakers are calling for a boycott of The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan over his decision to shoot the film in Morocco-occupied Western Sahara. The British filmmaker's choice of the city of Dakhla as a location for the film, which goes on general release on Friday, has been accused of normalising the north African kingdom's 50-year occupation of the territory.

Sahrawi journalist and filmmaker Mamine Hachimi is among those calling for the film to be boycotted.

"This is not a campaign against cinema or artistic freedom - it is a call for ethical responsibility," he told Middle East Eye.

Hachimi co-directed Three Stolen Cameras, a short documentary that detailed the difficulties facing the Sahrawi media organisation Equipe Media as it attempted to document the abuses perpetrated against the Sahrawis in Western Sahara. The film was initially set to premiere in Beirut in 2017, but was dropped following pressure from the Moroccan government. Members of Equipe Media also faced arrest and harassment from Moroccan authorities.

"Two of my colleagues, Abdallah Lhafaouni, who is serving a life sentence, and Bachir Khadda, who is serving a 20-year sentence, are political prisoners simply because they documented human rights violations in occupied Western Sahara," he explained. "It is deeply disturbing that while Sahrawi journalists are imprisoned for exposing abuses, an international film production can use our homeland as a cinematic backdrop without addressing the reality of the occupation."

[…]

Sahrawis say the real scandal is over Nolan's whitewashing of Morocco's exploitation of their homeland. They also point out that the same security services involved in brutalising Sahrawi campaigners in the occupied territory facilitated the shoot.

Meanwhile, the Moroccan minister of culture, Mohamed Mehdi Bensaid, snapped selfies with Nolan and expressed his hope it would "give visibility to Dakhla as a film location and not just a tourist destination".

a transcription

I especially hope that people take the time to digest her penultimate paragraph:

The most troubling ethical problem with Nolan’s Odyssey concerns the decision to film part of the movie in the occupied territory of Western Sahara, thus normalising the ongoing violence against the indigenous Sahrawi people. It is particularly galling that Nolan used this land simply as a visually striking backdrop for a film that centres, aggrandises and redeems the hero of a territorial war on account of his belated and partial acknowledgment of his own guilt.

— An Uncomplicated Man by Emily Wilson (London Review of Books)

The simple act of holding a camera in my homeland of Western Sahara can be a crime. When Sahrawi film-makers and journalists attempt to document everyday life under Moroccan occupation, they can often end up in prison cells. For the Moroccan regime, a camera in the hands of a Sahrawi threatens its official narrative that Western Sahara is part of Morocco.

In contrast, when celebrated international names in the film industry wish to capture an ideal picture for an epic journey, and decide that our land is exotic enough to shoot the desired scenes, they are welcomed, escorted and granted access by the same authorities that usually deny us that right.

This is the bitter and paradoxical reality in Western Sahara, an occupied territory with many material and immaterial riches. While foreign extractors of all kinds freely plunder Western Sahara’s phosphate minerals, sand, fish, and tomatoes, and commodify our winds, sunlight and picturesque desert landscapes, we the Indigenous Sahrawis are becoming a minority in our own homeland, systematically marginalised, silenced and denied access to the land we roamed as nomads for centuries.

The latest episode of this colonial drama stars the Christopher Nolan blockbuster using parts of our occupied territory as a film set. Sahrawis are aghast that scenes from The Odyssey – an adaptation of Homer’s poem immersed in themes of displacement, family separation, betrayal, and the agonising, decades-long struggle to return home – were shot on our lands. The irony would be comical were it not so tragic: we, the Sahrawi people whose land was used to film parts of the Odyssey, have been living our own brutal odyssey for more than 50 years.

— Mohamed Sleiman Labat

Despite the MAGA overreaction to the bold casting choices in what was bound to be a relatively conservative film, it was Donald Trump that made this colonial backdrop possible:

The Odyssey is the first major Hollywood production to shoot scenes in Western Sahara. This would have been unthinkable prior to 2020, when President Donald Trump broke with decades of US foreign policy and recognized Morocco’s illegally established sovereignty over the territory. The decision was part of a quid pro quo in exchange for Morocco’s normalization of ties with Israel. Now Nolan and crew’s four-day shoot in Dakhla illustrates how quickly Hollywood studios have moved to exploit the opportunities created by Trump’s transactional diplomacy. This subsidized occupation cinema is yet another symptom of the breakdown of whatever remained of a rules-based liberal order.

For Moroccan officials, the presence of The Odyssey crew was a propaganda coup. They have made it clear they see it as just the beginning of Dakhla’s development as a base for international film productions. This is despite the fact that the wider Western Sahara remains the site of an ongoing armed conflict between the country’s military and the Sahrawi pro-independence movement, the Polisario Front. Last month, three Polisario fighters were killed in a Moroccan drone attack close to the 2,700-kilometer sand berm that separates Moroccan-controlled territory from the desert areas held by Polisario.

Nolan’s vision of the world is not quite big enough to include either real gods or real people who might be different from us.

And if you also hadn't heard of her go read this because uhh... Holy Shit

This story sounds like it could have been a brilliant exploration of gender and warfare and violence but instead it was attacked by people who didn't know how to confront a story that made them uncomfortable, and the author faced horrible consequences.