In Search of Wes Anderson’s “Phoenicia”

In Search of Wes Anderson’s “Phoenicia” August 2026 | Vol. 14.8 By Helen Dixon Wes Anderson’s The Phoenician Scheme (2025) is a film that invokes the ancient Mediterranean world without depicting it. Its title points to the first‑millennium BCE Phoenicians — maritime traders, purple‑dye producers, and worshippers of Ashtart and other deities who once occupied coastal Syria, Lebanon, and Israel in the Levant. But the film itself unfolds in an alternative mid-20th century, where powerful outsiders attempt to build a “Modern Greater Independent Phoenicia” in the Middle East. The result is a cinematic world shaped by receptions of antiquity: nationalist mythmaking, colonial cartography, and the visual repertoire through which Western audiences imagine the ancient Near East. Viewed through a reception‑historical lens, the film raises an interesting question: what exactly does “Phoenicia” mean in the modern imagination? Anderson’s version of Phoenicia functions less as a historical place than as a cultural construct. I argue that it serves as a stand-in for the British Mandate of Palestine and many of the characters’ obsessions with large infrastructure projects — canals, tunnels, dams, and hotels — echo the grand colonial development projects that shaped 20th‑century visions of the Middle East. In this way, Anderson’s fictional “Phoenicia” becomes a vehicle for exploring contemporary anxieties over more recent historical pasts. At the same time, the film indirectly evokes some of the more positive associations attached to Phoenicianism through both the film’s central protagonist and the distinctive aesthetic of its sets and costuming. “Phoenician” as a Modern Identity “Phoenician” is a term scholars use to designate a language, people, and religion well documented along the first millennium BCE Levantine coast. Outside of academia, “Phoenician” has also become a modern identity with its own currency. In Lebanon, Phoenician ancestry emerged in the early 20th century as a powerful nationalist narrative, especially among Maronite Christians and segments of the diaspora. The appeal lay in the Phoenicians’ imagined cosmopolitanism. In this retelling, they were literate, mobile, mercantile, and pre‑Islamic (and nearly always men). These qualities resonated with communities seeking to articulate a distinct identity amid the political reorganization that followed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and, later, independence from French colonial rule. This modern Phoenicianism was shaped by contemporary needs — the Phoenicians became ancestors invoked to articulate historical gravitas, resilience, and global reach. The film’s dedication — “In memory of Fouad Mikhael Maalouf. Born in Bethlehem, died in London. Shaded in life by the cedars of Lebanon” — anchors the narrative in a modern Lebanese family’s history. Fouad Maalouf is the father of Wes Anderson’s wife, Juman Malouf, who also moved the family to Saudi Arabia during his lifetime. The dedication’s phrasing, linking Bethlehem (in the contemporary West Bank) and Lebanon, evokes the lived experience of diaspora, mobility, and regional instability. It also signals that Anderson’s Phoenicia is shaped by inherited narratives rather than historical reconstruction. The story of Anderson’s father in-law is the inspiration for the life of Anatole “Zsa‑Zsa” Korda (Benicio del Toro), the film’s protagonist. His major undertaking — the “Korda Land and Sea Phoenician Infrastructure Scheme” — consists of a canal, railway tunnel, dam, and hotel, each designed to reshape the landscape for future commercial enterprises. Korda’s life is shaped by his emotional distance from those around him (especially his daughter Liesel, played by Mia Threapleton), his repeated survival of catastrophes and assassination attempts, and his relentless drive to build something lasting. It is through Korda that Anderson explores the emotional stakes of heritage, ambition, and paternal legacy. Colonial Cartography In his film, Anderson creates a new “Phoenicia”, the odd geographic outline of which recalls the artificial boundary-drawing of 20th century colonial powers. The film introduces three regions — Upper, Lower, and Eastern Independent Phoenicia — each marked by coordinates that correspond to locations in Syria, the Red Sea, and the Saudi–Kuwaiti border, but which appear on a single landmass in the project’s maps. The mismatch between the stated coordinates and the maps used by Korda’s team is likely deliberate: Anderson constructs a fictional state whose borders are aspirational, but unstable or even impossible in the real world. The film’s use of incoherent coordinates seems to serve as a critique of the real territorial divisions imposed by historic colonial powers that ignored populations and divisions on the ground. In the spatial logic of the British Mandate of Palestine, surveys and maps were used to rationalize, control, and develop the region. The Palestine Exploration Fund’s Survey of Palestine (1872–1880), for example, became a tool of development and governance, shaping territorial expectations even before the Mandate formalized them. Anderson’s Phoenicia inherits this cartographic strategy: a space defined not by lived geography but by the abstract lines of colonial ambition and the willingness to shape the landscape to commercial purposes. Prince Farouk’s introduction as the representative of “Upper Independent Phoenicia” underscores this dynamic. His and his father King Hussain’s names echo real Egyptian and Jordanian monarchies, and his role is shaped by foreign interests. When we first meet the dashing prince (played by Riz Ahmed), he is quite literally pulled into a game he has never played before (basketball). The scene becomes a visual metaphor for the ways local rulers were entangled in the games of colonial powers. The landscape around the prince — a flat desert with monumental ruins — also reflects an empty Middle East of European colonial imagination rather than the bustling reality of either the 20th century Levant or 1st millennium BCE Phoenician city-states, both of which were fertile and well populated. It’s possible that Anderson’s desert setting echoes language like that of Israel’s first Prime Minister David Ben Gurion, who called to develop the Negev by “making the wilderness bloom.” The monumental heads in the background seem lifted directly from the Turkish site of Nemrut Dağ. The use of this UNESCO world heritage site extends the collage-like approach to the landscape of “Phoenicia” in the film, while highlighting a site where ancient imperial and local tastes produced innovative sculptural expressions (much like the eclecticism attributed to Phoenicians, as we will see below). A Man, A Plan, A Canal… Panama Phoenicia? Infrastructure projects make up one of the film’s most striking points of contact between history and fiction. The proposed canal, railway tunnel, dam, and hotel that make up the titular Phoenician Scheme reflect the hubris of real-world colonial megaprojects. The “Trans‑Desert Inland Waterway” in Lower Independent Phoenicia evokes the Suez Canal (completed in 1869), the Panama Canal (finished in 1914), or perhaps even the unrealized Ben Gurion Canal Project, a 1960s proposal to connect the Gulf of Aqaba to the Mediterranean. In several published reviews, Korda has been compared to Ferdinand de Lesseps, architect of the Suez and original visionary for the Panama Canal — both men embody grandiose infrastructural ambitions. De Lesseps’s Panama Canal project actually failed, ruined by financial problems and epidemic disease resulting from his plan to construct at sea level (it was bought out by the US, who changed the design significantly to complete it). “The Trans-Mountain Locomotive Tunnel” in the film is attributed to the “Territory of His Majesty the 7th King of Lower Western Independent Phoenicia,” King Hussain, father of Prince Farouk mentioned above. In Lebanon, rail travel between Damascus and Beirut dates back to 1895. Expansion of the rail lines to the south was undertaken by the British and then destroyed by Israeli forces in 1948, and a functioning railway largely ended during the Lebanese Civil War. But Anderson may be evoking the Palestine Railways (also “Mandate Railways” and “Palestine (Land of Israel) Railways” in Hebrew) that functioned 1920–1948, connecting Egypt and Mandate Palestine in order to access the Suez Canal. While these real-world projects were built, they came at great cost to the laborers and communities that were disregarded in service to the vision, and most had short-lived usefulness because of the territorial and ideological problems their creators ignored. The final component of the Phoenician Scheme is a “Trans-Basin Hydroelectric Embankment” in “Eastern Independent Phoenicia.” This project is also introduced as the “Domain of the Hilda Sussman-Korda Private Utopian Outpost, Middle Independent Phoenicia” (the contradiction in “Eastern” and “Middle” is never addressed). With the language of “private utopian outposts,” Anderson makes the parallels between his imagined “Phoenicia” and the historical “Palestine” more direct — this is a reference to Israeli kibbutzim, collective agricultural or industrial settlements run through shared governance and profit. A modified translation of Exodus 15:8, “Lo, the current stood firm,” is inscribed on the dam itself (“Lo” is a typical KJV translation for the Hebrew hinneh, which does not appear in the verse). Even cousin Hilda (Scarlett Johansson)’s name, Hilda Sussman, seems selected to represent a German Jewish immigrant to Israel. It is therefore all the more interesting that the dam’s coordinates lie near the border between Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. One might think the scope of the dam would point to the Aswan High Dam (completed in 1970) as a reference point, but I think that the Ruafa Dam near Abu Ageila in the north of the Sinai Peninsula (close to Egypt’s border with Israel and site of several significant battles between the two states) is more salient to this imagined construction site. Anderson might also be invoking the historic Rutenberg Power Station (also known as the First Jordan Hydro-Electric Power House), a hydroelectric power station on the Jordan river that operated between 1932 and 1948 and supplied power to Mandatory Palestine. While the characters that represent each of these projects in the film do not match specific historic personalities, Anderson seems to be remixing real colonial development projects through Korda’s complicated Phoenician Scheme, even as Korda’s vision remains unrealized at the end of the film. The final node in the scheme is the “Royal Majestic Imperial Calouste Korda Desert Oasis Palace” hotel, which serves as the place where Korda’s fragile agreement is articulated, brokered, and then disintegrates (perhaps suggesting historical referents like the King David Hotel in Jerusalem or the Luxor Winter Palace Hotel). Neo-Phoenician Aesthetics? A final way Phoenicianism threads through the film is through set and costume aesthetics, especially in the climactic hotel scenes. The “Royal Majestic Imperial Calouste Korda Desert Oasis Palace” hotel, where the final negotiations of the Phoenician Scheme unfold, blends Egyptian Revival architecture, Art Deco ornamentation, and Orientalizing motifs. Gold and pastel renderings of Egyptian columns, papyriform patterns, and dramatic curtains recall early twentieth‑century theatrical design. This aesthetic is a presentation of ancient motifs shaped by Egyptomania — the European and American fascination with Egyptian motifs that flourished from the nineteenth century onward. The Fox Theatre in Atlanta, for example, explicitly combined references to the Alhambra in Granada and the Temple of Karnak in Luxor in its 1928 design, producing a deliberately Orientalizing fantasy space. Anderson’s hotel sits squarely within this tradition. As articulated by Edward Said, “Orientalism” refers to Western depictions of the East that reductively construct an alluring and threatening “other.” Anderson’s sets and costuming reject simple interpretations of this aesthetic (the threatening Uncle Nubar always appears in a Western-style suit, for example), instead offering a pastiche of modern and ancient imagery the characters register and navigate in unspoken ways throughout the film. In particularly striking scenes, Uncle Nubar’s executive suites feature canopic jars and pharaonic statuettes alongside Orientalizing paintings. This interest in Egyptian deities and symbolism is also traceable to the Phoenicians themselves. For example, two kings of the city-state of Sidon had themselves buried in Egyptian sarcophagi (King Tabnit and Eshmunazor II), and Egyptian hieroglyph-shaped amulets were the preferred grave good for the inhabitants of Phoenician cities such as Amrit, Tyre, and Sarepta. Wes Anderson’s mother, Texas Anne Anderson (née Burroughs), studied archaeology in graduate school at Rice University after divorcing Wes’s father in 1977. One almost wonders if she would have had a copy of something like Sabatino Moscati’s The World of the Phoenicians (1968), or even Perrot and Chipiez’s History of Art in Phoenicia and Its Dependencies (1885), which present Phoenician material culture as eclectic and Egyptian-influenced, around the house for Wes to stumble upon. “Phoenician art” has long been (problematically) described as a kind of artistic chimera, a mix of iconography that drew on Egyptian, Achaemenid Persian, and Greek elements. Whether or not Anderson was informed by light research on Phoenician art or simply embraced his own eclectic vision of the early-twentieth century cultural interest in the past, the result is an intriguing neo-Phoenician aesthetic. The “Phoenician-ness” of this Egyptomaniacal dreamscape is emphasized when Korda puts on a long white garment with stylized papyrus fronds woven into its edges. The white fez is perhaps a nod to Druze leaders (in modern Lebanon, Syria, Israel, and elsewhere), who often wear a red fez wrapped in a white band or cloth. Anderson’s fetishization (across several films) of the Ottoman fez as a symbol of un-self-aware colonialism is often discussed. But this white fez sets Korda apart from even other fez-wearers at the negotiations, and the garment sets him in sharp contrast with Uncle Nubar’s Western, dark pinstripe suit in their fight scene, evoking elements of modern Lebanese identity and the reception of Phoenician symbols. Phoenicia as a cipher for Palestine By setting his film in an imagined, colonial-constructed neo-Phoenicia, Anderson gains the freedom to explore the political, social, and cultural fault lines of the modern Levant at a safe distance. British Mandate Palestine occupied different borders from today’s West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the word “Palestine” now carries urgent associations with occupation, humanitarian crisis, civilian deaths, and geopolitical instability. In this context, Anderson’s decision to “Phoenicianize” the region can be read both as a distancing device for English-speaking audiences and as a commentary on the long history of external powers reshaping the Middle East. Neither “Palestine” nor “Phoenicia” appears in the Hebrew Bible under those names (the “Philistines” are linguistically connected to the former; the latter is an etic term introduced by the Greeks), yet both belong to the biblical world and its enduring symbolic geography. In one sense, The Phoenician Scheme has little to do with ancient Phoenicians. In another, it is deeply engaged with the many modern meanings attached to Phoenician identity by colonial administrators, contemporary nation-states, Western consumers, diasporic communities, and others. Across these contexts, Phoenician-ness has been invoked to signify political neutrality, historical prestige, artistic eclecticism, and treasured ancestry. The film participates in this complex conversation, drawing on Orientalist imagery, colonial opportunism, and grand development schemes to create a world that feels both surreal and unsettlingly familiar. Wes Anderson’s “Phoenicia” is therefore not a historical setting but a conceptual stage on which power, exploitation, and the uneasy inheritance of the twentieth century can be examined. The film critiques colonialism through Korda’s ambitions and failures: businessmen are corrupt, monarchs are ineffective, and vast development projects are ultimately doomed. The only character who insists “myself, I feel very safe” is the one repeatedly targeted for assassination. Meanwhile, the next generation — represented by Korda’s daughter — appears bewildered by the world it has inherited, echoing broader anxieties about the legacies of past political decisions. At the end of the film, Korda seems to find fulfilment in giving up his world-building ambitions in favor of a quiet reconnection with his daughter, a legacy that frames the film’s dedication. The film seems to end longing for a world in which the ambitions of powerful men are set aside, making space for the quiet, more human work of living. Helen Dixon is Assistant Professor of History at East Carolina University. This essay was adapted from the following: Dixon, Helen. “What’s Phoenician about ‘The Phoenician Scheme’?” Advances in Ancient Biblical and Near Eastern Research (AABNER), Vol. 5, Issue 1: https://aabner.org/ojs/index.php/beabs/article/ view/1246. Further Reading: Kaufman, Asher. 2001. “Phoenicianism: The Formation of an Identity in Lebanon in 1920.” Middle East Studies 37, no. 1: 173–94. https://doi.org/10.1080/714004369. Martin, S. Rebecca. 2017. The Art of Contact: Comparative Approaches to Greek and Phoenician Art. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sader, Hélène. 2019. The History and Archaeology of Phoenicia. Atlanta: SBL Press. How to cite this article: Dixon, H. 2026. “In Search of Wes Anderson’s ‘Phoenicia'”, The Ancient Near East Today 14.8. Accessed at: https://anetoday.org/wes-anderson-phoenicia/. Post a comment