Jacob Paton is a British producer and Film Acquisitor who has worked at Paramount Pictures, Picturehouse Entertainment, and Fremantle Europe. He is a keen yet fierce cinephile and film critic; who has studied Film and Social Anthropology at the National Film and Television School UK, McGill Montreal, and The University of Edinburgh (MA). 

I initially and naively hoped that this film was a critique on the European nomad who trots the third world with zero care and respect for the local, the culture, the social norms, and the political unrest; which seemed subversive enough for a European film exploiting Morocco’s already limited film fund. However, the following Q&A hosted by Luca Guadanino, who quickly proclaimed this his ‘film of the year!’, revealed that the director, Oliver Laxe, spent most of his 20s in similar European raves in the Moroccan desert. Laxe then went on to emphasise his sympathies and fondness towards these white communities in non-white spaces, both self-absorbed in their own rave culture and in some form of *spirituality* (of course the European and LSD-fuelled, not Berber or Arab).

Both in this film and the following Q&A, there’s a deliberate ambiguity in Luxe’s mentioning of location; Morocco does not border Mauritania unless you treat Western Sahara as Moroccan territory. The refusal to name the Western Sahara, and this film’s reliance on generic “desert” signifiers, uses the region’s seeming danger and mystique for atmosphere and yet with no mention of the ongoing disputed territories or the Sahlawi. Furthermore, every single Moroccan in this film is used as a vessel to push this atmosphere of alienation; generic North Africans are not individuals in Luxe’s world. 

Much like with Jesse Eisenberg’s A Real Pain, privileged Westerners go on a spiritual journey through a country far poorer than their own and both fail to shine a light on that nation, people, and identity accurately. I’d go so far to argue that in both films, the host country becomes wildly misrepresented and simplified for dramatic effect (Poland being consistently antisemitic and dilapidated, Morocco being consistently barren, hostile and angry). 

Both films hold nominal ties to any real identity and yet both are somehow backed by their respective host film institutes. 

This new epidemic is obvious; young Western directors take advantage of poorer countries and their eagerness to develop their own filmic landscape through local grants and support, ultimately resulting in subtle remnants of colonial fear of the Other. One is free to make a film in any country that is not their own; but if you decide to rely on your host country’s film institute for support, you take on a responsibility to represent its people as more than backdrop or, even worse, a threat where they are reduced from human being to caricatured “savage”.