The simple act of holding a camera in Western Sahara can be a crime. Sahrawi filmmakers and journalists who document life under Moroccan occupation often face imprisonment.
For the Moroccan regime, a camera in Sahrawi hands threatens its official narrative that Western Sahara is part of Morocco.
Yet when international filmmakers like Christopher Nolan choose to shoot in the territory, they are welcomed and granted access by the same authorities that deny Sahrawis that right.
This paradox is at the heart of a bitter reality, according to Sahrawi multidisciplinary artist Mohamed Sleiman Labat.
Labat wrote an opinion piece published by Asatu News, criticizing Nolan's decision to film parts of "The Odyssey" in Dakhla, a city in occupied Western Sahara.
"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," Labat wrote.
Western Sahara has been occupied by Morocco since 1975, when Spanish colonial authorities handed over the territory to Morocco and Mauritania.
Today, half of the Sahrawi people live in refugee camps in Algeria, while the other half lives under a military police state separated by a 2,700km militarized wall built by Morocco and fortified with millions of landmines.
Extractivist Practices in Western Cinema
Labat argues that Nolan's choice to film in an occupied territory highlights extractivist practices embedded in the Western film industry.
"Western cinema has often been complicit in mining stories and immaterial culture from the global south at a scale no smaller than the material resources mined by the western colonial industrial complex," he wrote.
International film crews "parachute in, shoot our faces, clothing, dunes and material culture, then fly off," gaining prestige and awards while Sahrawis remain silenced.
Labat noted that Nolan did not seek Sahrawi consent or consider the ethics of legitimizing Morocco's occupation.
"He is actively participating in a state-sponsored PR campaign designed to legitimize an illegal occupation," Labat said.
Under international law, using resources of a non-self-governing territory without the consent of its Indigenous people is illegal, he added.
Morocco weaponizes cinema to whitewash its occupation, courting foreign film crews while denying Sahrawis the right to film and express themselves.
This erasure is parallel to other processes of displacement and replacement, including flooding the territory with Moroccan settlers and cultural symbols.
"Film-makers, in this context, are not neutral agents; their tools and positions can enable politics of erasure," Labat wrote.
Audiences coming to see "The Odyssey" deserve to know the ethics behind the film's production, he said.
"We the Sahrawi do not want our homeland to be the sanitized backdrop for western epics.
We want to tell our own stories, shoot our own films and decide for ourselves," Labat concluded.
