Christopher Nolan western in the Western Sahara filming has drawn criticism after The Odyssey used parts of Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara as a set, including Dakhla. The criticism centers on a basic split in access: an international production was able to film there, while Sahrawi people say they face punishment for using cameras at home.
Mohamed Sleiman Labat, a Sahrawi writer from Western Sahara, said: “The simple act of holding a camera in my homeland of Western Sahara can be a crime.” He added: “When Sahrawi film-makers and journalists attempt to document everyday life under Moroccan occupation, they can often end up in prison cells.”
Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara
Labat’s complaint is aimed at more than one location. He said scenes from The Odyssey were shot on Sahrawi lands, and he argued that the shoot did not seek Sahrawi consent. In his view, the production helped legitimize Morocco’s occupation at a moment when the territory remains politically contested.
The timeline he set out begins in 1975, when Spanish colonial authorities handed Western Sahara to Morocco and Mauritania. More than 50 years later, he said, half of the Sahrawi people live in refugee camps in the Algerian desert, while the other half lives under what he called a suffocating military police state.
Western Sahara under occupation
Labat also linked the film shoot to daily restrictions that shape Sahrawi life. He said the Indigenous Sahrawis are becoming a minority in their own homeland, while foreign extractors freely plunder phosphate minerals, sand, fish, and tomatoes. He said Morocco has built a 2,700km militarised wall fortified with millions of landmines.
That is the friction in this story: a global film set could operate in Western Sahara, yet the people whose land appears on screen can face prison for the same act of filming their own surroundings. Labat put it bluntly: “For the Moroccan regime, a camera in the hands of a Sahrawi threatens its official narrative that Western Sahara is part of Morocco.”
He ended by tying the production to a wider history of erasure: “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.” The unresolved issue is simple and direct: whether Christopher Nolan or the production team sought consent from Sahrawi people or local representatives before filming in Moroccan-occupied Western Sahara.
The Odyssey and Sahrawi consent
Peter Bradshaw is listed in the source as the reviewer attached to the wider discussion around The Odyssey, but the immediate issue remains the same for readers: the film used Sahrawi land, and the criticism is about who was allowed to speak, film, and decide. For Sahrawi people, the practical question is not whether the set looked dramatic on screen; it is whether their own land was treated as a place where outsiders can work freely while locals cannot document their lives without fear.
