As blockbuster director Christopher Nolan prepares to release his highly anticipated new film *The Odyssey* to global audiences this Friday, a growing movement of Sahrawi activists, journalists and filmmakers is demanding a widespread audience boycott, sparked by Nolan’s decision to shoot key scenes in Dakhla, a city located in Morocco-occupied Western Sahara.
For nearly 50 years, Morocco has maintained military and political control over Western Sahara, a disputed territory where the indigenous Sahrawi population has long campaigned for full self-determination. Activists argue that Nolan’s production choice actively normalizes Morocco’s decades-long occupation, turning a contested, occupied homeland into a scenic backdrop for a Hollywood blockbuster without any acknowledgment of the territory’s fraught political reality.
Mamine Hachimi, a Sahrawi journalist and documentary filmmaker who is leading the boycott call, emphasized that the campaign is not an attack on artistic expression — it is a demand for ethical accountability from global cultural creators. Hachimi co-directed *Three Stolen Cameras*, a 2017 short documentary that chronicled the risks faced by independent Sahrawi media collective Equipe Media as they documented human rights abuses against local populations under Moroccan rule. The film was pulled from its scheduled Beirut premiere after the Moroccan government applied diplomatic pressure, and multiple Equipe Media members have faced ongoing arrest and harassment from Moroccan authorities.
Hachimi pointed to the ongoing incarceration of two of his colleagues as evidence of the stark double standard at play: Abdallah Lhafaouni is serving a life sentence, while Bachir Khadda is serving a 20-year sentence, both detained solely for documenting human rights violations in occupied Western Sahara. “It is deeply disturbing that while Sahrawi journalists are imprisoned for exposing abuses, an international film production can use our homeland as a cinematic backdrop without addressing the reality of the occupation,” he said.
While much of the mainstream public conversation around *The Odyssey* has centered on manufactured controversy stirred up by far-right online trolls targeting lead actor Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy — a controversy Nolan has dismissed as irrelevant — Sahrawi activists insist this is a distraction from the far more substantive ethical scandal of the film’s production location. They note that the same Moroccan security forces responsible for routine violence and repression against Sahrawi pro-independence campaigners directly facilitated Nolan’s shoot in Dakhla. Moroccan Culture Minister Mohamed Mehdi Bensaid has even publicly embraced the production, posing for selfies with Nolan and saying he hopes the film will raise Dakhla’s profile as a global filming and tourism destination.
Despite a high-profile open letter from global public figures including Oscar-winner Javier Bardem, legendary filmmaker Pedro Almodovar and climate activist Greta Thunberg calling for all Dakhla-shot scenes to be cut from the final film, Nolan has refused to publicly address the demands. Requests for comment from Universal Pictures and Nolan’s production company Syncopy Inc. have also gone unanswered.
Mohamedsalem Werad, a Sahrawi documentary filmmaker who gained international acclaim for his work on the life of iconic Sahrawi singer Mariem Hassan, called Nolan’s silence deeply disappointing. “Choosing to film in occupied Western Sahara was not a politically neutral production decision — it meant operating with the permission of the occupying power in a territory where the indigenous Sahrawi people have long been denied the opportunity to exercise their right to self-determination,” he explained. For Werad, a widespread audience boycott is the only clear way to send a message that creators cannot expect viewers to ignore choices that legitimize illegal occupation.
Another Sahrawi filmmaker, Abidin Mohamed Hamudi, went further, accusing the entire *The Odyssey* production team of complicity in the subjugation of the Sahrawi people. He framed Hollywood’s choice as the most extreme expression of a longstanding pattern: capitalist Western economies exploiting the land and resources of the Global South for profit. “Shame on them — history will put everyone in the place they deserve, and they will be in the dustbin of history, remembered as nothing but cultural parasites,” Hamudi said.
With a reported $250 million production budget and riding high on the critical and commercial success of Nolan’s Oscar-winning *Oppenheimer*, *The Odyssey* is projected to be one of the summer’s biggest blockbusters, set to draw millions of viewers looking to escape into a mythic world of ancient gods, epic battles and fantasy. But behind the glitz and marketing hype, Sahrawi activists say, lies a stark, underreported reality that both Hollywood and the international community have chosen to ignore for decades.
The Western Sahara International Film Festival (FiSahara), which is hosted annually in Sahrawi refugee camps in southwestern Algeria — where hundreds of thousands of displaced Sahrawis have lived since being forced from their homeland by Moroccan forces — has emerged as a key organizer of the boycott. FiSahara Executive Director Maria Carron pointed out that Nolan’s crew relied on security support from the same Moroccan military and police forces that routinely target Sahrawi filmmakers and activists just kilometers from the Dakhla filming location. Local resisters face beatings, arbitrary arrest, and confiscation of equipment for simply documenting daily life under occupation, Carron noted. During filming last year, FiSahara and a coalition of Sahrawi creators and activists publicly protested, urging Nolan and Universal to suspend production, leave the territory, and refuse to include Dakhla footage without the explicit consent of the Sahrawi people. Their appeals were rejected.
“FiSahara calls for a general audience boycott of the film and for Nolan to be held accountable for personally benefiting from an illegal occupation by collaborating with Moroccan authorities to enter and film the territory and then by using images of Western Sahara without the consent of their rightful and legal owners, the Sahrawi people — an act that amounts to plunder,” Carron said.