Sahrawi activist Mohamed Sleiman Labat has criticised Christopher Nolan for filming scenes of his blockbuster The Odyssey in Western Sahara, a territory occupied by Morocco, arguing this legitimises the occupation while Indigenous Sahrawis are denied the right to document their own lives. He notes the bitter irony that a film about displacement, separation and the long struggle to return home was shot on land whose native people have endured their own real-life odyssey of exile and repression for over 50 years. Labat argues that international film crews are granted access and protection by Moroccan authorities that Sahrawi journalists and film-makers are routinely denied, sometimes at the cost of imprisonment.

The piece traces the occupation back to 1975, when Spain handed the territory to Morocco and Mauritania, resulting in a brutal invasion. Today, roughly half the Sahrawi population lives in refugee camps in the Algerian desert, while the rest remain under military rule, separated by a 2,700km Moroccan-built wall lined with landmines. Labat frames Nolan's production as symptomatic of a wider "extractivist" pattern in Western cinema, whereby film-makers take striking images and cultural material from occupied or marginalised places without engaging with the political realities behind them, leaving Sahrawi voices silenced both on screen and in real life.