Global Courant
There won’t be….”Barbie world in Vietnam this summer.
The Southeast Asian nation has banned the release of “Barbie,” the upcoming movie directed by Greta Gerwig, over a scene featuring the so-called nine-dash line, a U-shaped dotted line on a map that denotes territory to the south. China Sea which both China and Vietnam claim as their own.
The nine-dash line is used on Chinese maps to indicate its claim to as much as 90 percent of the South China Sea.
While an international tribunal in The Hague ruled in 2016 that China had no legal basis for its claims, Beijing has yet to budge on the ruling and has instead sought to dominate the waters by conducting aggressive raids and developing military installations.
Vietnam, with its long-standing acrimonious ties with China, said on Monday that the new film would not be released in the country because of the use of the line, said Vi Kien Thanh, the head of the Vietnam Cinema Department. The decision was made by the National Film Appraisal and Classification Board, which is responsible for licensing and censoring foreign films in Vietnam.
Commenting on state media on Monday, Mr. Thanh that “Barbie” was banned because of “the illegal image of the ‘cow’s tongue line’ in the film”, using the usual Vietnamese expression for the nine-dash line.
Vietnamplusa state newspaper, wrote that the decision to include the rule “distorts the truth, violates the law in general and violates the sovereignty of Vietnamese territory in particular.”
China, Vietnam, the Philippines, Taiwan, Malaysia and Brunei all have territorial claims in the South China Sea, including islands and other strategic maritime features.
‘Barbie’, starring Margot Robbie, Ryan Gosling and a host of other celebrities, was set to be released in Vietnam on July 21. Some moviegoers in the country welcomed the government’s ban. Hoang Xuan Bach, a 23-year-old university student, said the producers should have known better than to include the card.
“I hope this movie flops,” he said.
This is not the first time Vietnam has banned films for containing scenes with the nine-dash line. ‘Uncharted’, a 2022 Sony action movie starring actor Tom Holland, and DreamWorks’ 2019 animation ‘Abominable’, were both dropped from the country’s box office for the same reason.
Vo Kieu Bao Uyen contributed reporting from Vietnam.
