{"id":3087,"date":"2026-06-07T13:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-07T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/2026\/06\/07\/kaouther-ben-hania-on-funding-paradoxes-and-how-every-movie-is-political\/"},"modified":"2026-06-07T13:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-07T13:00:00","slug":"kaouther-ben-hania-on-funding-paradoxes-and-how-every-movie-is-political","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/2026\/06\/07\/kaouther-ben-hania-on-funding-paradoxes-and-how-every-movie-is-political\/","title":{"rendered":"\u30ab\u30a6\u30b6\u30fc\u30fb\u30d9\u30f3\u30fb\u30cf\u30cb\u30a2\u304c\u8a9e\u308b\u8cc7\u91d1\u8abf\u9054\u306e\u30d1\u30e9\u30c9\u30c3\u30af\u30b9\u3068\u300c\u3059\u3079\u3066\u306e\u6620\u753b\u306f\u653f\u6cbb\u7684\u3067\u3042\u308b\u300d\u7406\u7531\u201c"},"content":{"rendered":"
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\tOutspoken Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania<\/a> (The Voice of Hind Rajab<\/a><\/em>, Four Daughters<\/em>, The Man Who Sold His Skin<\/em>) has made genre-bending films about women joining ISIS and police chasing down Muslim women who\u2019ve been raped. But her most radical political act, she argued during a panel at SXSW London 2026<\/a>, might simply be insisting that her Oscar-nominated film The Voice of Hind Rajab<\/a>, about a six-year-old<\/em> Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza, be a scripted drama instead of a documentary.<\/p>\n

\t\u201cWe think about some movie[s] as not political, but I think every movie is political,\u201d she said, in direct opposition to the members of this year\u2019s 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\u2019 case, directly saying filmmakers should avoid politics. \t<\/p>\n

\tHaving a point of view, Ben Hania argued, is inherently political. And if you\u2019re not going to have a point of view, why are you even making movies? \u201cBeing political is when you choose your angle, when you choose your main character and give him complexity and choose what he represents,\u201d she said. \u201cOr who is the secondary character? What are the links? All of those choices, we don\u2019t think about them as political, but they are.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tShe continued: \u201cYou don\u2019t need to have a political topic. You don\u2019t 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] \u2013 this is what we call the hierarchy of what is seen and what you don\u2019t see \u2013\u00a0this is already political.\u201d \t<\/p>\n

\tBen Hania, who lives in France, was speaking alongside her longtime French-Tunisian producer Nadim Cheikhrouha in an onstage conversation about \u201cthe politics of representation\u201d and said she feels a lot of pressure to represent stories from the Arab world and make them resonate to people who aren\u2019t from there. <\/p>\n

\tSometimes, Cheikhrouha said, they get accused of making films for the West when \u201cthat\u2019s not true; we\u2019re making films for everyone,\u201d 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\u2019t hurt that Western audiences will pay to see them.<\/p>\n

\tPeople ask Ben Hania all the time why The Voice of Hind Rajab<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n

\tMaking the film a drama, she said, was her way \u201cto give to the Palestinians.\u201d In other words, it was her chance to let them see themselves onscreen acting like real human beings. \t<\/p>\n

\tAs she explained, the cinema she grew up watching on VHS tapes \u201cwas born in Europe and then in the United States in a period when colonialism was high.\u201d Every movie she saw, she said, was based around a morally complex main character, \u201cand he\u2019s White, he\u2019s heterosexual,\u201d she said. \u201cWe have this prototype, from the cowboy to the soldier to Indiana Jones.\u201d But if White men are the only types of people who get to be main characters or leaders, she said, \u201cthis shapes how you see the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tAt the very least, she wanted the Palestinian characters to have \u201cthe moral complexity of the main character\u201d afforded to so many white antiheroes in so many movies and prestige dramas,\u201d including Mad Men<\/em>, Breaking Bad<\/em> and Dexter<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\tThe 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\t\u201cWhen we see the characters, they are real people in the Red Crescent trying to rescue this little girl,\u201d she said. \u201cThey are confronted with moral questions of what to do and how to do it.\u201d 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 \u2014 an optimism that would get those rescue workers killed. \t<\/p>\n

\t\u201cIt was very important to me to explore all those elements and to put her voice as the backbone of this movie,\u201d said Ben Hania, \u201cbecause I know in the dark theaters you have to listen. It\u2019s not like scrolling on your phone.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tStereotypes around Palestinians are so bad, Cheikhrouha said, that when he screened the film for \u201ca nice, normal, French\u201d friend of his, he said, \u201cthe 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\u2019s spread is that they don\u2019t care about children and the women just have tons of children and they all die.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tAnd 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\u2019t a single liberty taken with the facts because they knew they\u2019d face attacks that might kill the movie, said Cheikhrouha. \u201cWe needed to be sure that everything is totally true, that there is no ambiguity, that everybody involved is super clean, bulletproof,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd of course, we know that other films from the other angle of the story, they don\u2019t have to do that. And in our case, we needed to do more than everybody else.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tAs a woman Arab filmmaker, Ben Hania said, she also gets plenty of scrutiny even just at the pitch level. \u201cThe problem of cinema is it\u2019s not like painting or writing. It costs money,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd when you have an Arab-speaking movie, it\u2019s a nightmare to finance. We have this discussion often\u201d \u2013 she gestured toward Cheikhrouha, her producer. \u201cHe often tells me, \u2018Do a French-speaking movie, do an English-speaking movie, and you will have all the doors open to you.\u2019 I\u2019m talking about the size of the money, because I find it very revealing.\u201d \t<\/p>\n

\t\u201cThe system of financing, with people financing, with institutions financing, it\u2019s not a censorship in the common [use of the] word, but it\u2019s a way to choose certain subjects over others,\u201d Cheikhrouha said. \u201cAnd I think with this insidious rat race, it is, at the end of the day, censorship.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tIt\u2019s not just that financiers want Ben Hania to work in a more palatable\/commercial language, Cheikhrouha said. It\u2019s 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 \u201cbecause it\u2019s about women, about indoctrination, about radicalization,\u201d said Cheikhrouha. \u201cThe West likes these kinds of stories where they can feel, in a way, like a savior or superior watching the problems of southern countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tWhen they tried to pitch 2020\u2019s The Man Who Sold His Skin<\/em>, 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 fianc\u00e9e, Cheikhrouha said, \u201cOne of the questions was, \u2018What\u2019s her legitimacy in talking about modern art?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\u201cAnd I got mad!\u201d he continued. \u201cShe was trying to calm me, and I was telling them, \u2018Do you ask that to Ruben \u00d6stlund, for example, when he does The Square<\/em>? He\u2019s a White man; he can talk about anything, so modern art is normal?\u2019 It\u2019s as if they tell her, \u2018Keep doing movies about women with pain and problems and stuff.\u201d \t<\/p>\n

\tThe European film commissioners tried to steer them away from casting a handsome actor as the lead in The Man Who Sold His Skin<\/em>, Cheikhrouha said. \u201cThey were like, \u2018Why are you telling the story of a refugee who is beautiful, and coming [to Europe] out of love?\u2019\u201d But they also just get to keep weighing in \u201cbecause they can,\u201d he said,\u201cbecause if you don\u2019t have the money, you don\u2019t [get to make] movies, so in this way it\u2019s kind of, for me, censoring.\u201d<\/p>\n

\tAt SXSW London<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

\tFor 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.<\/p>\n

\t\u201cOften I talk to my French colleagues, and I tell them, \u2018You don\u2019t realize the privilege that you have. Beware, because the far right is coming to you,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\tThen she turned to directly address the London audience. \u201cHaving programs for the culture, don\u2019t take it as something granted, you know. Because it\u2019s not.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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\u2019ve 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. \u201cWe think about some movie[s] as not political, but I think every movie is political,\u201d she said, in direct opposition to the members of this year\u2019s Berlin […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3088,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[2,116,1828,27,60,1533,1534,1829],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3087","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hollywood","category-international","category-kaouther-ben-hania","category-movie-news","category-movies","category-sxsw-london","category-sxsw-london-2026","category-the-voice-of-hind-rajab"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3087","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3087"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3087\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3088"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3087"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3087"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/newsmag.live\/ja\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3087"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}