Greta Thunberg blames Morocco for sabotage at film festival

During an appearance at the Zurich Film Festival (ZFF), Swedish climate activist Greta Thunberg indirectly blamed Morocco for the alleged sabotage of a discussion event. The Swiss “Tagesanzeiger” reported on the process.

Thunberg traveled to Zurich to support the documentary “My Home of Wind and Sand”. The film follows Sahrawi activist Najla Mohamed Lamin and her campaign for a self-determination referendum in Western Sahara. The region has been the subject of an unresolved conflict between Morocco and the Polisario liberation movement for decades.

The event was initially fully booked online, reports the “Tagesanzeiger”. However, in the Corso 2 cinema hall, large parts of the total 300 seats remained unoccupied - according to the report, there were only 40 people in the hall. According to the “Tagesanzeiger”, the moderator of the panel discussion expressed the suspicion that it could have been a coordinated campaign in which a large number of tickets were reserved but then not used.

Thunberg himself went even further. According to the newspaper, the activist said that the striking number of empty seats was an indication that the Sahrawi people's struggle was being deliberately silenced. She named Morocco, which has largely controlled the resource-rich Western Sahara since the 1970s and considers it part of its national territory, as possibly responsible.

The Zurich Film Festival confirmed to the “Tagesanzeiger” that the event was fully booked in advance. It is regrettable that many reserved places remained unused. According to the festival, reservations were subsequently limited to a maximum of four tickets per person. It cannot currently be determined whether there was a targeted action behind the non-appearance.

According to her own information, the climate activist visited a Sahrawi refugee camp in Algeria as early as 2025. In Zurich she called on Europe to draw more attention to the conflict. At the world premiere of the documentary on Tuesday, Thunberg had already criticized the Western media's handling of the conflict. The situation of the Sahrawi people is largely ignored, she said. For many journalists, the decades-long conflict is “not attractive enough and not brutal enough” to attract attention. Neglecting the topic therefore amounts to “a betrayal on several levels”.

The Sahrawi have largely been living in refugee camps in the Algerian desert for decades. Their demand for a referendum on the future of Western Sahara has so far remained unfulfilled.