On the screen, Libyans learned about everything but themselves (2021)

Summary

The first Hollywood film I watched in a theater was “Star Wars: The Last Jedi,” in 2017 in Tunis — the movie in which Disney definitively ruined the franchise forever. Before that, in Libya, I used to buy pirated movies on CDs, or download them from illegal websites. Even the Libyan government got in on the piracy racket, illegally packaging the Arabic-speaking Disney channel along with 19 others and selling it just for 150 Libyan dinars. I say “just,” but 150 Libyan dinars was around $100 U.S., which for some Libyans in the 1990s was a month’s salary. Even in Libya’s “state of the people,” stolen entertainment wasn’t for everyone.On occasion, those 20 channels would suddenly disappear and be replaced by 20 identical versions of the state-owned Al-Jamahiriya TV channel whenever our “Brother Leader,” the late dictator Moammar Gadhafi, decided to speak to the people. Kids like me would be annoyed by the change from their favorite cartoon to footage of Brother Leader speaking for hours. It wasn’t until much later that I began to see this as part of how the state controlled what we saw, knew and even thought.My friends who grew up in the center of Tripoli have told me how, in the 1990s, they could occasionally persuade their fathers to let them rent a videocassette of a Disney film from particular stores. Living on the outskirts of the city, as I did, I never had that pleasure and only discovered them in the mid-2000s when, as a teenager, I started buying pirated CDs.From then on, I watched almost all the classic Disney movies. Around me, Libyans were buying satellite dishes for their homes so they could access the Egyptian Nilesat, with its hundreds of free-to-air channels. In 2005, I bought my first computer and began watching pirated movies in earnest: I became hooked on Hollywood films — “The Godfather” series, “Lord of the Rings,” “The Shawshank Redemption,” even older films like “12 Angry Men,” “Taxi Driver” and “Back to the Future.”Although “Back to the Future,” ...