Moon Knight director Mohamed Diab believes Western cinema still has a long way to go in portraying its homeland, Egypt.
He is attempting to rectify this with his work on Moon Knight, which uses ancient Egyptian mythology in its storylines.
“A lot of my pitch was about Egypt and how inauthentic it was in Hollywood history,” Diab told SFX magazine. “It’s always exotic – we call it Orientalism. It dehumanizes us. We’re always naked, we’re always sexy, we’re always nasty, we’re always over the top.”
Diab specifically rapped Wonder Woman in 1984 for playing to the tropics.
“You never see Cairo. Jordan always shoots for Cairo, Morocco shoots for Cairo, sometimes Spain shoots for Cairo. That really annoys us,” says Diab. “I remember watching Wonder Woman in 1984 and there was a big sequence in Egypt and it was a shame for us. They had a sheik – that doesn’t make 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 preaching about his beliefs. The show is based on a comic book, after all.
“[It’s] Part of the show because it’s part of the comic. It’s part of how he gets his powers. It’s rooted in that.” Diab said. “There was definitely room to play [in Moon Knight] but keep it as authentic as possible, in the realm of the fantastic. Even in the original comics, they did a great job researching and trying to make Egypt authentic.”
Moon Knight is coming to Disney+ on March 30th.