Christopher Nolan, director of the award-winning film Oppenheimer, who turns 55 today, is facing criticism for filming his new movie, The Odyssey, in Western Sahara, thus legitimising the Moroccan occupation of this territory, which is a non-self-governing territory occulated by Morocco with heavy military presence in an open conflict with the Polisario Front, recognised by the UN as the legitimate representative of the self-proclaimed Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic.
The fight for this region, the last colony in Africa to be abandoned by Spain in 1976, led to an armed conflict between 1979 and and 1991. When Spain left, Morocco immediately occupied the region. A ceasefire between Morocco and the Polisario happened in 1991, but hostilities resumed in 2020. Morocco has been accused of repeatedly violating human rights as they pushed the native Sahrawi people, including "arbitrary detentions, disappearances, torture, sexual and gender-based violence", according to Western Sahara International Film Festival (FiSahara), which published a statement urging Nolan to halt production in that region.
Dakhla (formerly known as Villa Cisneros), the second most populated region in Western Sahara with an estimated 106,277 people from the last census in 2014, was made by Morocco the capital of one of their occupied regions in Western Sahara, and are turning it into a tourist and sport destination. And now, Nolan's epic production is filming in Dakhla it's been viewed as a legitimation of Morocco's occupation of the city and suppression of the Sahrawi population.
"FiSahara urgently calls on Nolan and his crew, including film stars Matt Damon and Zendaya, to stop filming in Dakhla and stand in solidarity with the Sahrawi people who have been under military occupation for 50 years and who are routinely imprisoned and tortured for their peaceful struggle for self-determination."
"By filming part of The Odyssey in an occupied territory classified as a 'desert for journalism' by Reporters Without Borders, Nolan and his team, perhaps unknowingly and unwittingly, are contributing to Morocco's repression of the Sahrawi people and to the Moroccan regime's efforts to normalize its occupation of Western Sahara", said María Carrión, executive director of FiSahara, in a message that was also shared by actor Javier Bardem.
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"We are sure that if they understood the full implications of filming a high-profile film in a territory whose Indigenous peoples are unable to make their own films about their stories under occupation, Nolan and his team would be horrified".
The statement tells how Morocco is also erasing the Sahrawi population even in cultural terms, with films that portray the region as theirs while persecuting Sahrawi artists, and that Morocco only allows the entry to those who will not oppose to their illegal occupation of the region, like now Nolan and his crew that includes actors like Matt Damon, Tom Holland and Zendaya.