Christopher Nolan Faces Backlash Over Filming The Odyssey In Disputed Western Sahara

News18

5 days ago

Christopher Nolan faces criticism for filming The Odyssey in Western Sahara, a disputed territory. Activists and human rights groups urge solidarity with the Sahrawi people.
Acclaimed filmmaker Christopher Nolan is facing mounting criticism over his decision to shoot parts of his upcoming film The Odyssey in Western Sahara, a territory considered 'non-self-governing" by the United Nations and largely controlled by Morocco. While anticipation around Nolan's adaptation of Homer's Greek epic remains high, his choice of location has drawn sharp condemnation from activists, film bodies, and human rights groups.
According to Variety, key portions of the film were shot in the city of Dakhla, situated in the Moroccan-administered Dakhla-Oued Ed-Dahab region. However, Dakhla is also located within the borders of Western Sahara — a region with a long-standing and unresolved colonial legacy, and home to the Indigenous Sahrawi people who have been seeking independence for decades.
The Western Sahara International Film Festival (FiSahara), which operates out of Sahrawi refugee camps in Algeria, publicly urged Nolan and his team to cease filming in the region. 'Dakhla is not just a beautiful place with cinematic sand dunes. First and foremost, it is an occupied and militarised city whose Indigenous Sahrawi population is subjected to brutal repression by the Moroccan occupation forces," the festival said in a statement.
Calling the production's presence 'a form of complicity," the festival further stated, '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."
Sahara director Mara Carrin added, 'By filming part of 'The Odyssey' in an occupied territory classified as a 'journalistic desert' by Reporters Without Borders, Nolan and his team, perhaps unwittingly, are contributing to Morocco's repression of the Sahrawi people and to the Moroccan regime's efforts to normalise its occupation of Western Sahara. We're sure that if they understood the full implications of filming a high-profile movie 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."
Actor Javier Bardem, a past participant in FiSahara, also voiced his support by sharing the statement on Instagram. He wrote, 'For 50 years, Morocco has occupied Western Sahara, expelling the Sahrawi people from their cities. Dakhla is one of them, converted by the Moroccan occupiers into a tourist destination and now a film set, always with the aim of erasing the Sahrawi identity of the city. Another illegal occupation, another repression against a people, the Sahrawi, unjustly plundered with the approval of Western governments, including the Spanish. Free Sahara Now (sic)."
The Ministry of Culture of the Polisario Front — the Sahrawi nationalist movement that seeks independence — also released a strongly worded response, calling Nolan's production 'a dangerous form of cultural normalisation with the occupation" and 'an unethical exploitation of art and cinema to whitewash the image of a colonial situation."
However, not everyone views the development negatively. Reda Benjelloun of the Moroccan Cinematographic Center defended the decision, telling Medias24, 'Dakhla will indeed offer extraordinary opportunities in the future to foreign productions which will find geography very different from other regions of Morocco." He noted that Nolan's film marks the first major Hollywood production to film in the area, which he described as 'extremely important."
The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, and others, has also been shot across Greece, Italy, and other Moroccan regions. The film is scheduled for a global theatrical release on July 17, 2026.
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