Kaouther Ben Hania constantly explores the boundaries between fiction and documentary; her sixth film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, is now in theaters. As a filmmaker, she constantly explores the boundaries between fiction and documentary. Her previous film, Four Daughters, was nominated for the Best Documentary Academy Awards 2024, after being presented in Competition at the Cannes Film Festival. The film received numerous prestigious awards and was sold in over 40 territories. Her 2021 film, The Man Who Sold His Skin, was also nominated at the Academy Awards for Best International Feature Film in 2021, representing Tunisia. All her other films have premiered at prestigious festivals including: Cannes, Venice, AFI, Los Angeles, Locarno, IDFA, Hot Docs Toronto. (Photo by Ammar Abd Rabbo.)
It has been a very busy year for me, so I didn’t get to go to the cinema a lot, but a film that stood out to me that I watched was The President’s Cake, by the Iraqi director Hasan Hadi. It was a real discovery for me. I loved so many aspects of it: the photography, the story, the little girl, the grandma, the idea, the objective of making the president’s cake. And I loved the politics behind it, what it says without saying it directly. I love politics in movies, and I love movies which feature the unheard stories of voiceless people. We don’t hear the voices of the Iraqi people a lot, so whenever there is an Iraqi movie or, say, a movie from Sudan, I always really want to see it because I feel that those inside perspectives need to be heard and seen.
The President’s Cake is a beautiful, sensitive film and it’s the first feature by Hasan Hadi, who I think will go far, because of his really beautiful way of capturing stories and making us feel the emotions of them. I haven’t told him directly that I loved his movie, because I don’t have his contact information, but I hope he reads this and knows that I did really love it! In general, when I see a movie by a fellow filmmaker who I know personally, I will send them a text message. When it’s the other way around, and another director tells me that they loved my movie, it makes me really happy.
During awards season, you get to meet a lot of great filmmakers. For The Voice of Hind Rajab, that process is just starting, but I met wonderful people when I was doing the Oscar campaign of Four Daughters. And even with The Man Who Sold His Skin, which came out during COVID, I also met a lot of great people who loved cinema and who I talked to about filmmaking. Some of the filmmakers I met in the past few years are now good friends, and we send work-in-progress cuts to each other and ask one another for advice, because you always need feedback when you are making a movie.
In terms of TV shows, I barely had time to watch anything this past year, as I was finishing The Voice of Hind Rajab and I also shot another movie, Mimesis. But I did manage to see The Penguin, which I loved. I don’t generally gravitate towards superhero franchises, but I liked this TV show so much, because of the main character. I think what fascinated me about him was his refusal to feel emotion. We live in a world where we don’t like to feel things, because it makes us vulnerable, and he is an embodiment of this. It’s a subject I’ve been thinking about a lot with The Voice of Hind Rajab, since it’s a very moving and emotional story, and there are some people who can’t forgive me for making it, because they felt something. It’s that refusal of emotion.
When you are a woman of color who makes art of any kind, you are always facing unwritten rules. I always have to try to understand how the world works, so I can get my film into the world, faced with these unwritten rules that institutions impose. Those unwritten rules say emotion is not good. Being political is not good. You can’t be confrontational. Colors are not good. You have to be sober. There’s a lot of bourgeois thinking I have to deal with, but it helps me to understand all the hidden parameters I have to navigate in this world. Since I come from a different place with a different point of view, I think it’s interesting to try and hear or understand where other people are coming from. But it’s also extremely tiring, because I realize that in a lot of people’s eyes, I don’t have the legitimacy or the privilege to defend the fact that I have a story to tell. So, it forces me to work twice as hard, or more than that. But it’s also great, because it means that I have to perfect and hone my work even more, so I choose to see it as an advantage.
