London, July 11, 2026 (SPS) – The charity Sandblast has launched a protest campaign calling for an international boycott of Christopher Nolan's film “The Odyssey,” which is scheduled for release on July 17.
The initiative follows the filming of part of the movie in the occupied city of Dakhla, located in the occupied territories of Western Sahara, which has been under Moroccan occupation since 1975.
The NGO criticizes the film's official promotional campaign for highlighting filming locations in Greece, Italy, Ireland, and Scotland while deliberately omitting the fact that part of the production took place in a territory that remains on the United Nations list of Non-Self-Governing Territories and is still awaiting decolonization.
According to Sandblast, the production uses Dakhla merely as an "exotic backdrop," stripping it of its complex political reality and overlooking the fact that it is a heavily militarized area where the Sahrawi population is subjected to ongoing repression.
The campaign aims to draw attention to what the organization describes as the production team's lack of ethical responsibility and its silence on the issue.
Sandblast states that several Sahrawi and international solidarity groups repeatedly attempted to contact Christopher Nolan and members of the production team to raise awareness about the situation in the territory under Moroccan occupation.
"We have received no response," Sandblast said in a statement, warning that the complicity of major Hollywood studios in normalizing what it describes as an illegal occupation cannot be ignored and must be addressed before the film's theatrical release.
The organization stressed that the protest is not intended to judge the film's artistic or cinematic merits. Rather, it seeks to highlight what it considers an ethical red line: the use of an occupied territory as a sanitized landscape, which, in its view, contributes to legitimizing Morocco's occupation of Western Sahara.
Sandblast concluded by emphasizing that Dakhla is not an uninhabited desert available for the entertainment industry, but an occupied city in Western Sahara that remains the subject of an unfinished United Nations-led decolonization process.
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