Outspoken Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania (The Voice of Hind Rajab, 4 Daughters, The Man Who Bought His Pores and skin) has made genre-bending movies about ladies becoming a member of ISIS and police chasing down Muslim ladies who’ve been raped. However her most radical political act, she argued throughout a panel at SXSW London 2026, may merely be insisting that her Oscar-nominated movie The Voice of Hind Rajab, a couple of six-year-old Palestinian lady killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, be a scripted drama as a substitute of a documentary.
“We think about some movie[s] as not political, but I think every movie is political,” she mentioned, in direct opposition to the members of this 12 months’s Berlin Movie Competition jury, comparable to jury president Wim Wenders, director Alexander Payne, and actress Michelle Yeoh, who got here below hearth on social media for both sidestepping questions on politics or, in Wenders’ case, straight saying filmmakers ought to keep away from politics.
Having a perspective, Ben Hania argued, is inherently political. And should you’re not going to have a perspective, why are you even making films? “Being political is when you choose your angle, when you choose your main character and give him complexity and choose what he represents,” she mentioned. “Or who is the secondary character? What are the links? All of those choices, we don’t think about them as political, but they are.”
She continued: “You don’t need to have a political topic. You don’t need to do a movie about revolution to be political. Any story, the choice of the angle, the choice of where to put your camera, or the choice of [what to put outside your frame] – this is what we call the hierarchy of what is seen and what you don’t see – this is already political.”
Ben Hania, who lives in France, was talking alongside her longtime French-Tunisian producer Nadim Cheikhrouha in an onstage dialog about “the politics of representation” and mentioned she feels quite a lot of strain to symbolize tales from the Arab world and make them resonate to individuals who aren’t from there.
Typically, Cheikhrouha mentioned, they get accused of constructing movies for the West when “that’s not true; we’re making films for everyone,” he mentioned. However what’s true, he added, is that the West has an outsized, maybe perverse, curiosity in tales of trauma from the World South. Ben Hania, who just isn’t solely the primary Tunisian to be nominated for an Academy Award but additionally the one Tunisian in historical past to earn three Oscar nominations, is making the films she desires to make, however it doesn’t damage that Western audiences can pay to see them.
Folks ask Ben Hania on a regular basis why The Voice of Hind Rajab is a scripted drama as a substitute of a documentary, and he or she all the time solutions that selecting to not present photos of Palestinian carnage was her personal type of resistance. Onstage, she paraphrased a well-known quote from Jean-Luc Godard about how Israelis get to make fictional movies telling their tales by fantasy and legend, whereas Palestinians are confined to documentary, as if they need to always produce proof of their struggling.
Making the movie a drama, she mentioned, was her manner “to give to the Palestinians.” In different phrases, it was her likelihood to allow them to see themselves onscreen performing like actual human beings.
As she defined, the cinema she grew up watching on VHS tapes “was born in Europe and then in the United States in a period when colonialism was high.” Each film she noticed, she mentioned, was based mostly round a morally advanced fundamental character, “and he’s White, he’s heterosexual,” she mentioned. “We have this prototype, from the cowboy to the soldier to Indiana Jones.” But when White males are the one varieties of people that get to be fundamental characters or leaders, she mentioned, “this shapes how you see the world.”
On the very least, she needed the Palestinian characters to have “the moral complexity of the main character” afforded to so many white antiheroes in so many films and status dramas,” together with Mad Males, Breaking Unhealthy and Dexter.
The film takes place not in Gaza, however on the Crimson Crescent, a Palestinian emergency name middle removed from the motion, with actors reacting to the true, multi-hour recording of Hind Rajab’s terrified voice as she begged for assist whereas trapped in a automobile with the shot-up corpses of most of her household. Ben Hania had first come throughout Hind’s heartbreaking cellphone name like so many did, out of context, because it circulated on social media, sparking international outrage. Her intuition was to seize not the violence, however the feeling of helplessness and anger that had made her need to attain by the display and assist this little lady.
“When we see the characters, they are real people in the Red Crescent trying to rescue this little girl,” she mentioned. “They are confronted with moral questions of what to do and how to do it.” And so they make dangerous calls, like ready hours to ship in an ambulance till they’ve clearance from the Israeli Protection Forces, and, after they get that clearance, trusting that it’ll maintain — an optimism that may get these rescue staff killed.
“It was very important to me to explore all those elements and to put her voice as the backbone of this movie,” mentioned Ben Hania, “because I know in the dark theaters you have to listen. It’s not like scrolling on your phone.”
Stereotypes round Palestinians are so dangerous, Cheikhrouha mentioned, that when he screened the movie for “a nice, normal, French” buddy of his, he mentioned, “the thing she told me that shocked her with this movie is how much they fight to save this little girl, because one of the ideas that’s spread is that they don’t care about children and the women just have tons of children and they all die.”
And though the movie is a dramatization, one of many issues they needed to do, as Arabs making a film about Palestine, was guarantee that there wasn’t a single liberty taken with the info as a result of they knew they’d face assaults which may kill the film, mentioned Cheikhrouha. “We needed to be sure that everything is totally true, that there is no ambiguity, that everybody involved is super clean, bulletproof,” he mentioned. “And of course, we know that other films from the other angle of the story, they don’t have to do that. And in our case, we needed to do more than everybody else.”
As a lady Arab filmmaker, Ben Hania mentioned, she additionally will get loads of scrutiny even simply on the pitch stage. “The problem of cinema is it’s not like painting or writing. It costs money,” she mentioned. “And when you have an Arab-speaking movie, it’s a nightmare to finance. We have this discussion often” – she gestured towards Cheikhrouha, her producer. “He often tells me, ‘Do a French-speaking movie, do an English-speaking movie, and you will have all the doors open to you.’ I’m talking about the size of the money, because I find it very revealing.”
“The system of financing, with people financing, with institutions financing, it’s not a censorship in the common [use of the] word, but it’s a way to choose certain subjects over others,” Cheikhrouha mentioned. “And I think with this insidious rat race, it is, at the end of the day, censorship.”
It’s not simply that financiers need Ben Hania to work in a extra palatable/business language, Cheikhrouha mentioned. It’s that Western audiences solely need to see a sure kind of film coming from the Arab world. 4 Daughters, her 2023 Oscar-nominated experimental documentary a couple of household of Tunisian ladies through which two stunning youngsters depart to affix ISIS, finally received Western financing “because it’s about women, about indoctrination, about radicalization,” mentioned Cheikhrouha. “The West likes these kinds of stories where they can feel, in a way, like a savior or superior watching the problems of southern countries.”
After they tried to pitch 2020’s The Man Who Bought His Pores and skin, a couple of Syrian refugee who agrees to have his again tattooed by a controversial trendy artist as a technique to get into Belgium to rescue his fiancée, Cheikhrouha mentioned, “One of the questions was, ‘What’s her legitimacy in talking about modern art?’”
“And I got mad!” he continued. “She was trying to calm me, and I was telling them, ‘Do you ask that to Ruben Östlund, for example, when he does The Square? He’s a White man; he can talk about anything, so modern art is normal?’ It’s as if they tell her, ‘Keep doing movies about women with pain and problems and stuff.”
The European movie commissioners tried to steer them away from casting a good-looking actor because the lead in The Man Who Bought His Pores and skin, Cheikhrouha mentioned. “They were like, ‘Why are you telling the story of a refugee who is beautiful, and coming [to Europe] out of love?’” However in addition they simply get to maintain weighing in “because they can,” he mentioned,“because if you don’t have the money, you don’t [get to make] movies, so in this way it’s kind of, for me, censoring.”
At SXSW London, censorship had develop into main information after American activists Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker had their UK visas revoked whereas en route to talk on the competition over fears from the House Workplace that their criticism of Israel would gasoline antisemitism within the U.Ok.
For Ben Hania, who’s a part of a era of North African filmmakers who emerged from the freedoms of the Arab Spring and labored unfettered for a few years earlier than having to flee Tunisia because it turned again towards dictatorship, this second feels acquainted.
“Often I talk to my French colleagues, and I tell them, ‘You don’t realize the privilege that you have. Beware, because the far right is coming to you,’” she mentioned.
Then she turned to straight deal with the London viewers. “Having programs for the culture, don’t take it as something granted, you know. Because it’s not.”
