MANILA, Philippines – The Movie and Television Review and Classification Board (MTRCB) has removed on Tuesday, April 26 the film Uncharted from Philippine cinemas in response to a request from the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA).

The DFA had asked the MTRCB to “re-evaluate and pull out the screening” of the film for containing an image of China’s nine-dash line claim, which was invalidated by an international tribunal in 2016. 

“The nine-dash claim is contrary to national interest, which has been settled in the 2016 arbitral award,” the DFA said in a press release.

“The arbitral tribunal held that China’s nine-dash line has no legal basis as its accession to UNCLOS (United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea) 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,” it explained. 

Complying with DFA’s request, MTRCB has ordered the film’s distributor Columbia Pictures to stop showing the film in cinemas “unless and until they are able to remove the objectionable scenes.” Columbia has since complied.

This is not the first time that the DFA asked to pull a film from cinemas over the depiction of China’s nine-dash line. In 2019, they asked the MTRCB to remove the Dreamworks film Abonimable from cinemas for showing the line. Similarly, in 2021, they asked Netflix to take down episodes of the political drama Pine Gap for the same reason.

Uncharted is an action-adventure film starring Tom Holland and Mark Wahlberg. Based on the popular video game franchise, the film tells the story of a skilled pickpocket who ends up working with a treasure hunter to search for the lost gold of Ferdinand Magellan, tracing it back to an island in the Philippines. – Rappler.com