Remember when location scouting used to mean calcifying in a van somewhere outside of Barstow, chasing light and cinematic magic? These days, you get Nolan—the most strategic of British auteurs—assembling a globe-trotting cast beneath the dunes of Dakhla, Western Sahara, for Universal's big-ticket adaptation of Homer's The Odyssey. It's a move that has studios faint with anticipation and, this week, activists—and even rival festivals—flaming with condemnation.
Let's here cut to the crux: Universal's The Odyssey, set for a glaring Imax debut on July 17, 2026, is filming in a stretch the U.N. still labels a “non-self-governing territory,” one that Morocco's handled with all the subtlety of a siege. The Sahrawi people, indigenous to this strip, aren't getting screen time—they're getting repression. And thanks to the region's newfound popularity for streaming giants and big-budget shoots (see Amazon's The Wheel of Time), Dakhla has become as much a cinematic battleground as a political one.
The Western Sahara International Film Festival (FiSahara) has raised a blunt warning, practically begging Nolan and Universal to bail: “Dakhla is not just a beautiful location with cinematic sand dunes. Primarily, it is an occupied, militarised city whose indigenous Sahrawi population is subject to brutal repression by occupying Moroccan forces,” they said. For a festival staged in the heart of Sahrawi refugee camps, the message is personal. Universal, for its part, hasn't exactly rushed to comment.
Do big productions know—or care—where their sand gets kicked around? “By filming part of The Odyssey in an occupied territory billed as a ‘news black hole' by Reporters Without Borders, Nolan and his team, perhaps unknowingly and unwillingly, are contributing to the repression of the Sahrawi people by Morocco,” says the festival's statement. Cue the flashbacks to productions that blissfully parachuted into troubled regions for a quick horizon shot, then vanished amid human rights debris and festival fireworks.
Here's the industry twist: Morocco's film festival in Dakhla—positioned conveniently to shadow the real Sahrawi event—serves up high-gloss government messaging while locals barely get access to cameras, let alone the multiplex. Sahrawis making films about their lives work “clandestinely and at great risk,” their voices nearly erased in favor of spectacle and postcard visuals. When you've got Oscar-winners like Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz backing FiSahara, the call-out gets harder to ignore.
Nolan's Odyssey comes equipped with more star power than MTV's peak TRL lineup—Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Zendaya, and Anne Hathaway among them. The IMAX release strategy is classic Nolan: go big, go wide, go everywhere (Morocco, Italy, Ireland, and Scotland—he's not exactly booking studio backlots). But maybe, just maybe, the real epic is happening off camera, in front of military checkpoints, not Circe's island. In a statement aimed squarely at western filmmakers, FiSahara offered a gut punch: “We are sure that were they to understand the full implications of filming such a high-profile film in a territory whose indigenous peoples are unable to make their own films…Nolan and his team would be horrified.”
Let's be blunt. Studios like Universal are playing 3D chess with global locations, tax breaks, and street cred, but blur the moral line when it comes to the people left out of frame. It's not the first—nor will it be the last—time Hollywood's magic lantern has thrown shadows on the wrong side of history; what makes this story burn is Nolan's clout and the scale of The Odyssey. You can bet come July 17, 2026, every pixel on that IMAX screen will look impeccable. Just remember where those dunes stand, and who's still behind the fences when the crew packs up.
Would Nolan have chosen differently, given a full dossier instead of a location reel? Maybe, maybe not. But one thing's certain: Homer wrote epics about men caught between gods and wars—sometimes, the drama off set upstages everything caught on camera.
Your turn, reader. Does the art justify the place? Drop your thoughts below, follow for more, and check back for the official Odyssey trailer and poster breakdown as soon as Universal cracks them open.
