American action-adventure film "Uncharted" was removed from Philippine cinemas due to a scene containing an image of the nine-dash line maritime claims of China that is "contrary to national interest."
The Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) disclosed on Wednesday, April 27, that it requested the Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) to reevaluate and pull out the screening of the Sony movie in local cinemas.
The MTRCB "responded favorably" to the request, the department said.
In its response to the DFA, MTRCB stated that it had “ordered Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. to cease and desist from exhibiting the said motion picture, unless and until they are able to remove the objectionable scenes.”
"MTRCB further reported that Columbia has since complied with its order and has pulled out the movie from the cinemas," the DFA said.
The Foreign Affairs department stressed that the nine-dash claim is contrary to the country's national interest, which has been settled in the 2016 Arbitral Award.
"The Arbitral Tribunal held that China’s nine-dash line has no legal basis as its accession to UNCLOS has extinguished any of its rights that it may have had in the maritime areas in the South China Sea. China also never had historic rights in the waters within the nine-dash line," the DFA said.
This is not the first time that the department sought to prohibit the screening of a Hollywood movie featuring China’s nine-dash line. In 2019, it also requested the MTRCB to pull out the DreamWorks animated feature “Abominable” after a scene showed the Chinese nine-dash line.
In November last year, it also requested for the removal of the episodes showing a map of China’s so-called nine-dash line from the political drama “Pine Gap.”