Moon Knight director Mohamed Diab feels Western cinema has a way to go in its depictions of his native Egypt.
He is attempting to rectify that with his work on Moon Knight, which uses ancient Egyptian mythology in its storylines.
“In my pitch, there was a big part about Egypt, and how inauthentically it has been portrayed throughout Hollywood’s history,” Diab sold 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 1984 for playing 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 Knight, Diab wanted to keep things authentic without becoming preachy about his beliefs. The show is, after all, based on a comic book.
“[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 said. “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 Knight will be out on Disney+ on March 30.
