Kaouther Ben Hania Kaouther Ben Hania - Oscars 2026 - THR Video - 2026 Outspoken Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania (The Voice of Hind Rajab, Four Daughters, The Man Who Sold His Skin) has made genre-bending films about women joining ISIS and police chasing down Muslim women who’ve been raped. But her most radical political act, she argued during a panel at SXSW London 2026, might simply be insisting that her Oscar-nominated film The Voice of Hind Rajab, about a six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, be a scripted drama instead of a documentary.
“We think about some movie[s] as not political, but I think every movie is political,” she said, in direct opposition to the members of this year’s Berlin Film Festival jury, such as jury president Wim Wenders, director Alexander Payne, and actress Michelle Yeoh, who came under fire on social media for either sidestepping questions about politics or, in Wenders’ case, directly saying filmmakers should avoid politics.
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Having a point of view, Ben Hania argued, is inherently political. And if you’re not going to have a point of view, why are you even making movies? “Being political is when you choose your angle, when you choose your main character and give him complexity and choose what he represents,” she said. “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 speaking alongside her longtime French-Tunisian producer Nadim Cheikhrouha in an onstage conversation about “the politics of representation” and said she feels a lot of pressure to represent stories from the Arab world and make them resonate to people who aren’t from there.
Sometimes, Cheikhrouha said, they get accused of making films for the West when “that’s not true; we’re making films for everyone,” he said. But what is true, he added, is that the West has an outsized, perhaps perverse, interest in stories of trauma from the Global South. Ben Hania, who is not only the first Tunisian to be nominated for an Academy Award but also the only Tunisian in history to earn three Oscar nominations, is making the movies she wants to make, but it doesn’t hurt that Western audiences will pay to see them.
People ask Ben Hania all the time why The Voice of Hind Rajab is a scripted drama instead of a documentary, and she always answers that choosing not to show images of Palestinian carnage was her own form of resistance. Onstage, she paraphrased a famous quote from Jean-Luc Godard about how Israelis get to make fictional films telling their stories through myth and legend, while Palestinians are confined to documentary, as if they must constantly produce evidence of their suffering.
Making the film a drama, she said, was her way “to give to the Palestinians.” In other words, it was her chance to let them see themselves onscreen acting like real human beings.
As she explained, 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.” Every movie she saw, she said, was based around a morally complex main character, “and he’s White, he’s heterosexual,” she said. “We have this prototype, from the cowboy to the soldier to Indiana Jones.” But if White men are the only types of people who get to be main characters or leaders, she said, “this shapes how you see the world.”
At the very least, she wanted the Palestinian characters to have “the moral complexity of the main character” afforded to so many white antiheroes in so many movies and prestige dramas,” including Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Dexter.
The movie takes place not in Gaza, but at the Red Crescent, a Palestinian emergency call center far from the action, with actors reacting to the real, multi-hour recording of Hind Rajab’s terrified voice as she begged for help while trapped in a car with the shot-up corpses of most of her family. Ben Hania had first come across Hind’s heartbreaking phone call like so many did, out of context, as it circulated on social media, sparking global outrage. Her instinct was to capture not the violence, but the feeling of helplessness and anger that had made her want to reach through the screen and help this little girl.
“When we see the characters, they are real people in the Red Crescent trying to rescue this little girl,” she said. “They are confronted with moral questions of what to do and how to do it.” And they make bad calls, like waiting hours to send in an ambulance until they have clearance from the Israeli Defense Forces, and, when they get that clearance, trusting that it will hold — an optimism that would get those rescue workers killed.
“It was very important to me to explore all those elements and to put her voice as the backbone of this movie,” said Ben Hania, “because I know in the dark theaters you have to listen. It’s not like scrolling on your phone.”
Stereotypes around Palestinians are so bad, Cheikhrouha said, that when he screened the film for “a nice, normal, French” friend of his, he said, “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 even though the film is a dramatization, one of the things they had to do, as Arabs making a movie about Palestine, was make sure that there wasn’t a single liberty taken with the facts because they knew they’d face attacks that might kill the movie, said Cheikhrouha. “We needed to be sure that everything is totally true, that there is no ambiguity, that everybody involved is super clean, bulletproof,” he said. “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 woman Arab filmmaker, Ben Hania said, she also gets plenty of scrutiny even just at the pitch level. “The problem of cinema is it’s not like painting or writing. It costs money,” she said. “And when you have an Arab-speaking movie, it’s a nightmare to finance. We have this discussion often” – she gestured toward 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 said. “And I think with this insidious rat race, it is, at the end of the day, censorship.”
It’s not just that financiers want Ben Hania to work in a more palatable/commercial language, Cheikhrouha said. It’s that Western audiences only want to see a certain type of movie coming from the Arab world. Four Daughters, her 2023 Oscar-nominated experimental documentary about a family of Tunisian women in which two beautiful teenagers leave to join ISIS, ultimately got Western financing “because it’s about women, about indoctrination, about radicalization,” said 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.”
When they tried to pitch 2020’s The Man Who Sold His Skin, about a Syrian refugee who agrees to have his back tattooed by a controversial modern artist as a way to get into Belgium to rescue his fiancée, Cheikhrouha said, “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 film commissioners tried to steer them away from casting a handsome actor as the lead in The Man Who Sold His Skin, Cheikhrouha said. “They were like, ‘Why are you telling the story of a refugee who is beautiful, and coming [to Europe] out of love?’” But they also just get to keep weighing in “because they can,” he said,“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 become major news after American activists Cenk Uygur and Hasan Piker had their UK visas revoked while en route to speak at the festival over fears from the Home Office that their criticism of Israel would fuel antisemitism in the U.K.
For Ben Hania, who is part of a generation of North African filmmakers who emerged from the freedoms of the Arab Spring and worked unfettered for many years before having to flee Tunisia as it turned back toward dictatorship, this moment feels familiar.
“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 said.
Then she turned to directly address the London audience. “Having programs for the culture, don’t take it as something granted, you know. Because it’s not.”
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