Greta Gerwig’s
Barbie will not be headed to
Vietnam. The country has banned commercial screenings of the film because of a scene that shows a map of the contested “nine-dash line” in the South China Sea.
The nine-dash line is a U-shaped demarcation China has used to assert territorial claims in the South China Sea. Those claims are contested by other nations in the area, including Vietnam. While a court at the Hague issued an international arbitration ruling in 2016 repudiating the line, China has ignored the decision.
The issue is so fraught that
Barbie isn’t even the first movie Vietnam has banned over maps depicting the line.
Per
Reuters, a senior official in Vietnam’s Department of Cinema told the state-run
Tuoi Tre newspaper, “We do not grant license for the American movie ‘
Barbie’ to release in Vietnam because it contains the offending image of the nine-dash line.”
A rep for Warner Bros. did not immediately return
Rolling Stone’s request for comment.
Prior to
Barbie, the nine-dash line led the Vietnamese government to ban the 2019 animated DreamWorks film
Abominable, as well as Sony’s 2022 action flick,
Uncharted. Netflix also had to pull the 2021 Australian drama series
Pine Gap from Vietnam over a depiction of a nine-gap line map.
www.rollingstone.com
