Twenty-five years ago, in a galaxy far, far away…” George Lucas imagined sets in the middle of the Tunisian desert. With his teams, he brought out of the sand Mos Espa, a spaceport located on the fictional planet of Tatooine which he staged in the first episode “The Phantom Menace”, released in 1999 at the cinema.
This site was made in Ong Jmal, near Tozeur, in the south-west of the country, at the gates of the Saharan desert. It is here that the young Anakin Skywalker (Jake Lloyd) was born and raised, before he was freed by the Jedi Qui-Gon Jinn (Liam Neeson), in episode I of this intergalactic sage. And that he becomes the big bad Darth Vader.
The sequel after the ad
To prevent these sets from experiencing the same fate as the Mos Eisley site, built in 1977 a few kilometers away for “Star Wars. Episode IV: A New Hope, in 2014, the Tunisian Ministry of Tourism organized a fundraiser to save Mos Espa. The latter had been buried under the sand in 200. The dunes around these sets are also advancing, year after year, nibbling away at this heritage imagined by the film set designers Gavin Bocquet, Peter Walpole and Taieb Jallouli.
Berber identity, from erasure to reappropriation
Tunisia has always been a great source of inspiration for George Lucas. From his first film “Star Wars”, he went to draw on the centuries-old traditions of this country. Whether for homespun, this brown Jedi cape inspired by burnous, long ancestral wool coat worn by both shepherds and notorious. Or the dialect phrased by Yoda, which uses the “object, subject, verb” syntax, as is customary in the Berber language.
On the occasion of this international day dedicated to “Star Wars”, this Thursday, May 4, discover our video report produced last January on this exceptional site, twenty-six years after its construction by George Lucas and his teams. To discover at the top of the article.
