The Oscar-nominated Tunisian director behind 'The Voice of Hind Rajab,' during a SXSW London appearance, also discussed the Western thirst for Global South trauma.
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.
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.”
