Morocco plays everywhere — now it's playing itself

For decades the country stood in for Rome, Jerusalem and Westeros. A new wave of Moroccan films is telling its own stories.

Salah Edine11 Oct 2026 · 2 min read

Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

You have almost certainly seen Morocco on screen without knowing it. The desert outside Ouarzazate has been ancient Rome, the Holy Land and a slave city in Westeros. The country has been a film set for the whole world — and only lately has it become the star of its own stories.

The world's back lot

Start with the film that carries the country's best-known city in its name. Casablanca (1942) was made almost entirely on studio stages in California; not one scene was filmed in Morocco. The real Morocco arrived on the big screen twenty years later, when David Lean took Lawrence of Arabia across the deserts of Jordan, Morocco and Spain.

Lawrence of Arabia1962 · Film

After that, the big productions kept coming. Near Ouarzazate, the film studios and the old fortified village of Aït Benhaddou became a kind of open-air back lot. Ridley Scott used it twice: for the desert town where Maximus learns to fight in Gladiator, and for the crusader cities of Kingdom of Heaven. In Babel, Morocco was finally allowed to be Morocco — even if the story was still about visitors.

Television followed. In its third season, Game of Thrones turned Essaouira into the slave city of Astapor and Aït Benhaddou into Yunkai.

Game of Thrones2011 · Show

Playing itself

Being everywhere else has a cost: a country that is always a backdrop rarely gets to be the subject. That is what makes the last twenty-five years of Moroccan cinema so exciting.

Nabil Ayouch's Ali Zaoua (2000) followed street children in Casablanca and showed a city no studio set could fake.

Ali Zaoua: Prince of the Streets2001 · Film · ★ 4.0 on TellyFlick

More recently, Maryam Touzani has made two quiet, tender films set in old medinas. Adam (2019) is about a widowed baker in Casablanca and the young pregnant woman she takes in. The Blue Caftan (2022) follows a master tailor in Salé, his wife and his apprentice.