Sex, lies, and the handkerchief: Immigration and sexploitation in Catalan Otel·lo (2012)

The 2012 Catalan film Otel·lo is a Shakespeare adaptation that problematises contemporary media discourses on race, gender and immigration. With the casting of Iago as a filmmaker who sexually harasses and assaults the female actor in the workplace, this adaptation examines gender violence as the product of an oppressive patriarchal structure, rather than of immigration or race. I argue thus that Otel·lo disrupts the stereotypical image of the Arab and Muslim immigrant as rapist that is disseminated in Catalan, Spanish and European media and questions the authenticity of knowledge through its subversion of the documentary form