Why does Morocco still look like this on screen?

When a film or series takes its story to another country, that place becomes more than a location. Language, architecture, clothing, landscapes and people all contribute to the world being created on screen. For audiences unfamiliar with that country, these details can become part of how they understand it.

That is what caught our attention while watching the latest season of Outer Banks. Morocco entered the Netflix adventure series in Season 4 and returns in Season 5. Beyond the action, a few choices in how the country is represented made us look closer.

When Moroccan characters don't sound Moroccan

During one of the scenes set in Morocco, we hear the following Arabic dialogue:

"شكلها مش غريب عليا"
"مَشُفْتِش الراجل"
"بَسْ هي دي"

For anyone familiar with Moroccan Darija, something immediately feels off. The expressions sound much closer to Egyptian Arabic than to the dialect spoken in Morocco. To an international audience, the distinction might go unnoticed. The characters are speaking Arabic, the scene takes place in Morocco, and the story continues. But Arabic dialects are not interchangeable. They carry different vocabulary, pronunciation and expressions, and language is part of what makes a character culturally believable.

The issue is not necessarily whether the actor is Moroccan. Actors portray different nationalities all the time. The question is whether enough attention has been given to the cultural details of the character they are portraying. When productions invest heavily in locations, costumes, sets and visual effects, why should linguistic accuracy feel secondary?

A contemporary story, a familiar Morocco

The visual representation raises a similar question. Outer Banks draws on imagery international audiences have encountered many times before when Morocco appears on screen: traditional clothing, historic architecture, medinas, narrow streets and earth-toned environments.

None of these elements is inaccurate. They are part of Morocco, and its historic cities, traditional garments and architectural heritage remain essential parts of the country's cultural identity. The question is why these particular elements continue to dominate the visual language used to make Morocco immediately recognisable.

This is especially noticeable in a story clearly taking place in the present. Morocco is contemporary too, shaped by changing cities, different lifestyles, creative communities and multiple cultural identities. Traditional and contemporary realities coexist, yet international productions often seem much more interested in one side of that picture.

When “northern Morocco” is somewhere else

In Season 5, a coastline presented as northern Morocco was actually filmed around Dubrovnik, Croatia, with filming-location research identifying Sveti Jakov Beach as the location.

Using one country to represent another is completely normal in film and television, and the landscape itself is not necessarily unbelievable. Parts of northern Morocco share a Mediterranean visual language with other coastal regions.

What makes the choice interesting is what happens around that landscape. If the coastline could plausibly belong to several Mediterranean countries, what makes us read it specifically as Morocco? Language, clothing, people, props, architecture and other visual cues all participate in creating that sense of place.

Morocco, in other words, is not simply being filmed. It is being constructed for the viewer.

This is bigger than Outer Banks

Outer Banks is part of a much longer visual history. International cinema has repeatedly returned to medinas, kasbahs, markets, traditional clothing, earth-toned architecture and desert landscapes when placing stories in Morocco. Films such as Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation have also drawn on recognisable Moroccan historic and architectural settings within international action narratives.

These environments are real, and they offer filmmakers visually striking locations. But repetition creates familiarity, and familiarity can gradually become expectation. When audiences encounter the same references across different films and series, those references begin to define what Morocco is supposed to look like on screen.

This is where representation becomes more complicated than simply asking whether something is accurate. A medina can be real. A djellaba can be real. A kasbah or desert landscape can be real. Yet a representation made entirely from real elements can still offer a limited image of a country.

What is selected matters just as much as whether it exists.

The issue isn't that this Morocco doesn't exist

It does.

The issue is repetition.

When the same fragment of a country is selected again and again, that fragment can eventually begin to stand in for the whole. Morocco's identity is not contained within one architectural style, landscape, generation or way of life. It is shaped by different regions, languages, communities, histories and contemporary influences.

Yet much of that complexity rarely enters the international cinematic image. The result is not necessarily a false Morocco. More often, it is an incomplete one that has become so familiar that we barely question it anymore.

One series doesn't have to show every Morocco

There is an important nuance here. Outer Banks is an adventure series, not a documentary about Moroccan society. Its locations and characters serve a fictional story, and expecting one production to represent every dimension of the country would be unreasonable.

The answer is also not to remove medinas, traditional clothing, old architecture or rural landscapes and replace them with a supposedly more “modern” Morocco. That would simply create another narrow representation.

Traditional and contemporary Morocco are not opposites. They exist alongside one another.

The question is why one version has become so much easier for international cinema to recognise, reproduce and export than all the others.

Widening the frame

More thoughtful representation does not require inventing a different Morocco. Sometimes it begins with relatively small choices: letting a Moroccan character actually sound Moroccan, paying attention to cultural details, working with people who understand the context, or looking beyond the visual references audiences already expect.

None of this means abandoning the Morocco we already see on screen.

It means allowing more of Morocco to exist alongside it.

The goal is not to replace one Morocco with another, but to widen the frame.