Some nations ban ‘Kingdom’
Director Peter Berg’s “The Kingdom,” a star-studded Hollywood blockbuster set in Saudi Arabia, has been banned in several Persian Gulf kingdoms.
Puritanical Saudi Arabia, where most of the film’s story unfolds, doesn’t allow movie theaters. But other Gulf nations have also given the film a big thumbs-down. News agencies report that Kuwaiti censors have banished it there, and even libertine Bahrain’s Ministry of Information has barred the thriller.
The movie, about a group of federal agents that flies to the Persian Gulf to track down the terrorist who masterminded the killing of American oil workers and their families in Riyadh, “is not in conformity with the censorship laws of the Kingdom of Bahrain,” said an official at Bahrain’s Ministry of Information, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “The film vilifies a brotherly country, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia,” the official said. “It attempts to show Saudi Arabia as a country that supports terrorism or helps propagate it.”
Much of the movie, which stars Jamie Foxx and Chris Cooper, was filmed in the Persian Gulf city of Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, which, along with Qatar, is allowing the movie to be shown.
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-- Borzou Daragahi and Raed Rafei
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