According to state media, Vietnam has banned the upcoming “Barbie” movie from theaters because it contains sequences with a map indicating 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 deleted off the websites of the major theater chains in the nation.
Hanoi, which also claims portions of the waterway, frequently takes offense 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 picture and decided to restrict the screening of this movie in Vietnam due to a violation relating 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 theaters last year because it contained scenes with the nine-dash line.
A scene from the romantic comedy “Crazy Rich Asians” that showed a designer bag with a world map displaying the disputed South China Sea islands under Beijing’s authority was deleted from the film in Vietnam in 2018.
The animated DreamWorks picture “Abominable” was yanked from Hanoi theaters for the same issue a year later, while Netflix was ordered to remove episodes of its “Pine Gap” series last year due to similar images.
Shipping lanes and significant oil and gas deposits can be found in the South China Sea, and several of China’s neighbors are concerned that Beijing is attempting to enlarge its influence.
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