The movie Odyssey by Nolan has been recorded in Western Sahara, on land stolen from the Saharawi people, and received funding by the Moroccan regime, which has been performing ethnic cleansing and replacemente against the Saharawi. Unfortunately, Morocco is winning the diplomatic battle both in Africa and in the Western world, also by washing its image with cinema: not just Odyssey, but several other movies have and are contrbuting to hide the destruction of the Saharawi people. Here I link an article detailing the matter, in Italian. I offer below my translation:
"Morocco is exploiting the film industry to normalize its control over Western Sahara, a territory it has occupied for decades while ignoring international law. Thanks to a financial incentive offered by the government, part of Odyssey, Christopher Nolan's highly anticipated new film, was also filmed there: however, this is not the only case.
Western Sahara is a strip of territory south of Morocco, overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. For decades, it was a colony of Spain, which then abandoned it in the 1970s; since 1979, Morocco has remained the only foreign force with influence in the area. It controls ’80 per cent of the territory, while the remaining 20 per cent is in the hands of the Polisario Front, an independence movement that continues to fight against the occupation.
For the United Nations, Western Sahara is a «non-autonomous» territory, that is, a territory still subject to colonization: both because it is largely occupied by Morocco and because it has never formally declared its independence from Spain. For the International Court of Justice and the Court of Justice of the European Union, external claims to Sahrawi territory are illegitimate, and its people would have the right to self-determination (that is, to choose their own government).
For decades, more than 170,000 Saharawis, the inhabitants of Western Sahara, have lived in exile, mostly in refugee camps in neighboring Algeria. Those that have remained are subject to repression and discrimination by the Moroccan authorities. Over the years, Morocco has encouraged the transfer of its citizens to the territory, gradually altering its demographic composition.
Cinema has become a way for Morocco to legitimize this status quo, effective because it can count on an already robust film industry. In recent years, he has produced films that have had their distribution abroad, such as The Blue Caftan, the most viewed film abroad in the history of Moroccan cinema, and The Mother of All Lies, among the most appreciated by international critics. The country is also often home to international film sets: films such as Lawrence of Arabia, The Mummy, Gladiator, and more recently the popular fantasy series Game of Thrones have been shot at the studios in Ouarzazate, in the south and near the Sahara Desert.
International productions are attracted to Morocco by a lucrative tax rebate program: the state offers a 30 percent tax discount to productions that spend more than $1 million and film in the country for at least 18 days. The programme applies to all the territory administered by Morocco and also to Western Sahara. The Moroccan Film Center, the government agency that manages the program, defines it as a «southern province», presenting it as Moroccan territory.
Of the dozens of films that have benefited from the incentives over the years, at least three have ties to Western Sahara. In Nolan's Odyssey, the scenes set on Ogygia, the island where the nymph Calypso holds Ulysses for seven years, were filmed in the White Dune, a stretch of light sand near the coastal city of Dakhla. The second season of the Amazon series The Wheel of Time also has scenes filmed in the same locations. Finally, Sirāt, by Franco-Spanish director Óliver Laxe, which was not filmed in Western Sahara but is evidently set there, although he never makes this explicit.
In the film, a father and his son find themselves in southern Morocco fleeing unspecified riots along with a group of ravers, who go to spontaneous electronic music parties. They march south, towards Mauritania, until they reach a gigantic minefield.
The riots recall the Polisario Front's attacks on the Moroccan army in recent years; the minefield harks back to the actual border between Morocco and Western Sahara, where in the 1980s Morocco built a 2,700-kilometer wall flanked by one of the largest expanses of anti-personnel mines in the world. The film also features people wearing traditional Sahrawi clothing and vehicles very similar to those of the Polisario Front.
Laxe has been criticized by Sahrawi rights activists for never making this connection explicit, either in the film or in interviews. Even more so because he is an artist close to the left-wing counterculture, who has openly stood up for Gaza and Ukraine, for example, and who has had access to a huge international audience (Sirāt was one of the most acclaimed films at the Cannes Film Festival in 2025 and received two Oscar nominations in 2025).
Spanish writer Gonzalo Moure has written an open letter to the director accusing him of keeping quiet about the matter for reasons of economic convenience, given that he also shot it thanks to the Moroccan government's tax rebate program. Asked by activists, Laxe said his film wanted to be universal and apolitical.
In addition to attracting productions from abroad, Morocco has built a permanent cultural infrastructure in the occupied territory. Since 2008, it has organized the Dakhla Film Festival in Western Sahara, for which the Moroccan Film Center allocated the equivalent of more than 170,000 euros in 2026. The name of the organizing association —Association of Cultural and Artistic Animation of the Southern Provinces — uses the terminology with which the Moroccan government officially designates the territory, which throughout the festival is presented as Moroccan.
On the other hand, every year since 2003, Sahrawi activists have organized FiSahara, the Sahrawi film festival in the Tindouf refugee camps in Algeria (it cannot be organized in Western Sahara precisely because of the repression). According to María Carrión, its executive director, the Dakhla Film Festival was also designed to overshadow FiSahara's activities and erase activists' efforts to draw attention to the Saharawi cause.
FiSahara, Carrión explains to the Post, was initially funded by the Spanish government. From 2008, however, this funding gradually decreased, until it stopped in 2011. Over time, Spain's position has also changed, gradually moving closer to Morocco. Various other Western countries have done the same: it is a demonstration of the success of the Moroccan government's initiatives, which, in addition to cinema, uses many other tools to impose its demands, including trade agreements with large Western companies for the exploitation of Saharawi resources.
Last year, Morocco also achieved a major victory: the United Nations Security Council passed for the first time a resolution indicating the establishment of a regional government in Western Sahara under Moroccan sovereignty as the starting point in the conflict resolution negotiations, effectively shelving the option of a referendum on the self-determination of the Sahrawi people.