According to state media, Vietnam has banned the upcoming Barbie movie from theatres because it contains a map that depicts China’s territorial claims in the South China Sea. On July 21, Vietnam was scheduled to have the national premiere of Greta Gerwig’s fantasy comedy about the well-known doll, which also stars Margot Robbie and Ryan Gosling.
But after the government decided to outlaw the movie over its use of the so-called nine-dash line in several sequences, state media stated that the film’s showing times had been cancelled off the websites of the major theatre chains in the nation.
Hanoi, which also claims portions of the waterway, frequently takes offence to China’s deployment of the so-called “nine-dash line” to demonstrate its broad claims over the majority of the resource-rich sea. According to Vi Kien Thanh, director of Vietnam’s Department of Cinema, “the film review board watched the film and made the decision to ban the screening of this movie in Vietnam due to a violation regarding the ‘nine-dash line’,“.
Tien Phong, a different state-run media site, said that the nine-dash line scenario appeared numerous times in the film. Censors who check for gratuitous violence, explicit sex scenes, or politically sensitive content must approve all movies in communist Vietnam.
The Tom Holland-starring action and adventure film Uncharted was pulled from theatres last year because it contained scenes with the nine-dash line. A scene from the love comedy Crazy Rich Asians that showed a fancy purse with a global map displaying the disputed South China Sea islands under Beijing’s authority was also omitted by Vietnam in 2018.
A year later, Hanoi banned the animated DreamWorks movie Abominable from theatres due to the same problem, while Netflix was ordered to remove Pine Gap episodes last year due to similar scenes. Shipping lanes and significant oil and gas deposits can be found in the South China Sea, and several of China’s neighbours are concerned that Beijing is attempting to enlarge its influence.
