Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey used the location as a film. This sounds like a betrayal | The Odyssey

The doesn’t just hold the camera in his home country Western Sahara it can be a crime. When Sahrawi filmmakers and journalists try to document daily life under Moroccan rule, they often end up in jail. For the Moroccan government, the camera in Sahrawi’s hands threatens its claim that Western Sahara is part of Morocco.

On the contrary, when the famous names of all kinds in the film industry want to take a proper picture on a regular trip, and decide that our country is too foreign to be able to take pictures of what we want, they are welcomed, escorted and given opportunities by the same authorities who often deny us the right.

This is a painful and shocking reality in the Western Sahara, a region with a lot of wealth and no physical presence. While foreign extractives of all kinds freely seize the phosphate minerals, sand, fish, and tomatoes of the Western Sahara, and change our winds, sunlight and beautiful desert landscape, we Sahrawi Indians are living in the minority in our country, unorganized, speechless and not allowed to enter the places where we roam like nomads.

The latest episode of this colonial drama is a favorite Christopher Nolan blockbuster using parts of our film-like section. Sahrawis was horrified that the film The Odyssey – based on Homer’s poem centered on themes of migration, family separation, betrayal, and years of persecution back home – was shot in our countries. These surprises would not have been sad: we, the Sahrawi people whose land was used to film parts of the Odyssey, have been living our barbaric life for more than 50 years.

Our country was brutally attacked by soldiers from the north and the south in 1975, when the Spanish colonial authorities gave the region to the people. Morocco and Mauritania. Today, half of our people languish in refugee camps in the Algerian desert, while the other half live under a military police regime, separated by a 2,700 km 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 obsessed with fiction and the magic of cinema, it seems easier to “unearth” a 3,000-year-old story of suffering, alienation and betrayal than to see that today, those very themes are the real life of the Sahrawi people every day.

Nolan’s choice to make a film in a mass media setting reflects the Extractivist practices within the Western film industry. Western films are often concerned with the issues of mining and bare culture from the global south to a lesser extent than the riches mined by western colonial industries. International film crews shoot, shoot our faces, clothes, mud and physical culture, then fly away. For them, it seems that we are just decorations on their sets and back in New York, London or Paris, they get fame, return the box office and awards.

For the shooting of Dakhla by Nolan, it seems that they did not ask for our permission or it is considered that it contributes to the legitimacy of Morocco, which makes the place unsafe for the Sahrawis living under it. They are engaged in a government-sponsored PR campaign designed to gain recognition as illegal immigrants.

In a non-self-governing region – which Western Sahara is, according to the UN – the use of material or non-material resources of a country without the express consent of its people is not only unacceptable; under international law, it is illegal. Our place, our culture, and our heritage are ours.

Morocco uses cinema to destroy our country. By engaging foreign filmmakers to shoot in the Western Sahara while denying Sahrawi freedom to film and express themselves, Morocco uses cinema to create a romantic, tourist-friendly image of a government that uses every political, economic and cultural tool to maintain the status quo and deny Sahrawi existence and resistance. Such erasing methods are similar to other editing and modification methods. When Moroccan violence forced many Sahrawi families to flee Western Sahara during the war, the government flooded the region with hundreds of thousands of Moroccans, flooding the streets with flags, icons and cultural symbols. It is a deliberate campaign to destroy our language, write our stories, and systematically change our place and culture. Filmmakers, in this context, are neutral, their tools and roles can contribute to the destruction of politics.

The audience is coming to see The Odyssey well suited. They have the right to know about the values ​​that led to the making of this film. The movie scenes that were sold to them as the places and times in which the historical epics took place were filmed because of the suffering of the Sahrawi people.

We Sahrawis don’t want our country to be a sanctified western epic. We want to tell our stories, shoot our videos and create ourselves. Our cultural independence is essential to our independence. Until international filmmakers refuse to comply with the oppressive regime of our country, and until we have the freedom to hold our cameras without fear of imprisonment, every frame filmed in our country by a foreigner may have the effect of a betrayal of the art of storytelling.

Mohamed SStamp Labat and a Sahrawi multidisciplinary artist living in Sahrawi refugee camps, South-West Algeria. His art draws on the past and present life of the Sahrawi people through various methods practices including films, writing and community skills. He is the director of Motif Art Studio in Refugee camp in Samaralimited space for design and testing.