Christopher Nolan’s epic used the occupied territories as a film location. This sounds like betrayal Odyssey

TSimply carrying a camera in my home country of Western Sahara can constitute a crime. When Sahrawi filmmakers and journalists try to document daily 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 world-famous names in the film industry want to capture the perfect photo of an epic journey, and it is decided that our land is exotic enough to film the desired scenes, they are welcomed, escorted and granted access by the same authorities that usually deny us this right.

This is the bitter and contradictory reality in Western Sahara, which is an occupied region and abounds with many material and non-material wealth. While foreign extractors of all kinds freely plunder Western Sahara’s phosphate minerals, sand, fish and tomatoes, commodifying our wind, sunshine and stunning desert landscapes, we indigenous Sahrawis have become a minority in our homeland, systematically marginalized, silenced and denied access to the land we have roamed as nomads for centuries.

The latest episode of this colonial drama stars Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film using parts of our occupied territories as a filming location. Sahrawis are horrified that scenes from “The Odyssey” – an adaptation of a Homeric poem steeped in themes of displacement, family separation, betrayal and the painful, decades-long struggle to return home – have been filmed on our territory. The irony would be comical if it were not so tragic: We, the Sahrawi people whose land was used to film parts of The Odyssey, have been living our brutal epic for more than 50 years.

Our homeland suffered a brutal military invasion from the north and south in 1975, when the Spanish colonial authorities handed the region over to Morocco and Mauritania. Today, half of our people are in refugee camps in the Algerian Sahara, while the other half lives under a stifling military police state, separated by a 2,700-kilometre-long military wall built by Morocco and fortified with millions of landmines.

Such facts and stories will never make it to the big screen. In a world drawn to the imagination by the magic of cinema, it seems easier to “excavate” a 3,000-year-old story of suffering, separation and betrayal than to see that these specific themes today are realities that the Sahrawi people live with daily.

Nolan’s choice to film in an occupied zone highlights the extractive practices inherent in the Western film industry. Western cinema has often been complicit in narratives of mining and immaterial culture from the Global South on a scale no less than the material resources extracted by the Western colonial industrial complex. International film crews parachute in, shoot our faces, clothes, sand dunes, and material culture, and then fly off. To them, we seem to be merely decorative elements for their collections, and by returning to New York, London or Paris, they gain prestige, box office revenues and awards.

As for Nolan’s depiction of Dakhla, it appears that he neither asked for our consent nor took into account the ethics of helping to support and legitimize the Moroccan occupation, making the space even more dangerous for the Sahrawis living beneath it. He is actively involved in a state-sponsored public relations campaign aimed at legitimizing the illegal occupation.

In a non-self-governing region — Western Sahara, according to the United Nations — using the land’s material or intangible resources without the explicit consent of its indigenous people is not only unethical; Under international law, it is illegal. Our land, our culture and our heritage belong to us.

Morocco uses cinema as a weapon to justify its occupation of our land. By courting foreign film crews to film in Western Sahara while denying Sahrawis the right to film and express themselves, Morocco is using cinema to manufacture a tourist-friendly romantic image designed by a regime that uses every political, economic and cultural tool to maintain the status quo of occupation and deprive Sahrawis of existence and resistance. These mechanisms of erasure parallel other processes of displacement and replacement. When Morocco’s atrocities forced many Sahrawi families to flee Western Sahara during the war, the regime flooded the region with hundreds of thousands of Moroccan settlers, and flooded the streets with imported flags, pictures, and cultural symbols. It is a deliberate campaign to systematically weaken our language, replace our stories, and replace us and our culture. Filmmakers, in this context, are not neutral agents, and their tools and positions can enable politics of erasure.

Audiences coming to see The Odyssey deserve better. They have a right to know the ethics behind making this film. These cinematic clips were sold to them, where the places and moments in which the historical epics took place were filmed at the expense of the suffering of the Sahrawi people.

We Sahrawis do not want our homeland to be the sanitized background for Western epics. We want to tell our stories, make our films and decide for ourselves. Our cultural self-representation is fundamental to our right to self-determination. Until international filmmakers refuse to submit to the oppressive occupying power in our homeland, and until we have the right to carry our cameras without fear of imprisonment, every shot filmed in our land by an outsider could have the effect of being a betrayal of the art of storytelling.

Muhammad SLyman Labat He is a Multidisciplinary desert artist In Sahrawi refugee camps Southwest Algeria. He paints his art About the past and present of the Sahrawi people through different Practices including films and writing and community-based art. He is a manager Motif Arts Studio in Samarra refugee campA small space for artistic production and experimentation.