Hollywood Epic’s Black Helen of Troy Shifts US Culture Wars to Ancient Greece

Eleni StamatoukouAthensBIRNJuly 8, 202607:55The casting of a black actor as the legendary beauty in Christopher Nolan’s Hollywood remake of Homer’s Odyssey is stoking right-wing fury in the US – but some Greeks point out that no one ‘owns’ antiquity. No one could have imagined that the Odyssey, the great epic poem by the ancient Greek writer Homer, would one day become the cause of a major battle in the American “culture wars” more than two-and-a-half millennia later. The reason is the casting of a new film by the multi-award-winning British-American filmmaker Christopher Nolan – of Oppenheimer, Dunkirk and Inception fame. Nolan has made a Hollywood fantasy-epic version of the story of the ten-year adventure-filled journey of the legendary Greek king Odysseus back to his homeland, Ithaca.

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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Balkan Insight.