The organisers of the Western Sahara international film festival (FiSahara) have criticised Christopher Nolan for shooting part of his adaptation of the Odyssey in a Western Saharan city that has been under Moroccan occupation for 50 years, warning the move could serve to normalise decades of repression.
The British-American film-maker’s take on Homer’s epic, which stars Matt Damon, Charlize Theron, Zendaya, Lupita Nyong’o and Anne Hathaway, is due to be released on 17 July 2026.
According to the Hollywood studio Universal, which is backing the project, the film will be “a mythic action epic shot across the world” made “using brand new Imax film technology”.
But the decision to film in the Western Saharan coastal city of Dakhla has provoked fierce criticism from Sahrawi activists and those who were forced to live under occupation or to go into exile after Morocco annexed the country following the withdrawal of its former colonial power, Spain, in 1976.
The UN classifies Western Sahara as a “non-self-governing territory”. In a report last year, the UN secretary-general noted that the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) had not been granted access to the territory since 2015, adding that OHCHR “continued to receive allegations relating to human rights violations, including intimidation, surveillance and discrimination against Sahrawi individuals particularly when advocating for self-determination”.
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