Moon KnightMohamed Diab, director of the Egyptian Film Institute believes that Western cinema still has much to learn about his homeland Egypt.
He is working to correct that situation with his work. Moon KnightThis storyline uses ancient Egyptian mythology.
“In my pitch, there was a big part about Egypt, and how inauthentically it has been portrayed throughout Hollywood’s history,”Diab purchased SFX magazin. “It’s always exotic – we call it orientalism. It dehumanizes us. We are always naked, we are always sexy, we are always bad, we are always over the top.”
Diab specifically knocked Wonder Woman 1984Thanks for tapping into the tropes.
“You never see Cairo. You always see Jordan shot for Cairo, Morocco shot for Cairo, sometimes Spain shot for Cairo. This really angers us,” Diab says. “I remember seeing Wonder Woman 1984 and there was a big sequence in Egypt, and it was a disgrace for us. You had a sheik – that doesn’t make any sense to us. Egypt looked like a country from the Middle Ages. It looked like the desert.”
In Moon KnightDiab wanted to remain authentic while not being too preachy about his beliefs. After all, the show is based on a comic.
“[It’s] part of the show because it’s part of the comic book. It’s part of how he gets his powers. It’s ingrained in it.”Diab added. “There was definitely room to play [in Moon Knight] but keep it as authentic as possible, in the realm of being fantastical. Even in the original comic books they did a great job of researching and trying to make Egypt authentic.”
Moon KnightDisney+ will make the announcement on March 30.