The Urgent Hybrid Cinema of Kaouther Ben Hania (THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB)
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Join Sundance Collab for an exclusive online conversation with Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania on her new film.
The Voice of Hind Rajab, written and directed by Ben Hania, debuted to overwhelming praise at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize, and it has since earned a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language. The film is based on the events of January 29, 2024, when volunteers at the Palestine Red Crescent were alerted to call a five-year-old girl trapped in a car in Gaza and did everything they could to keep her on the line and get an ambulance to her. It has been named one of the Best Movies of 2025 by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and the Associated Press.
Ben Hania takes an experimental hybrid approach to this devastating story. A director of both fiction and documentary films, she incorporates the actual audio recordings of Hind Rajab's final phone calls into an otherwise scripted narrative feature. The result is a devastating anti-thriller: We witness a doomed race-against-time rescue mission as helplesslessly as her would-be rescuers experience it.
Ben Hania’s artistic approach builds upon her two previous Academy Award-nominated films. Four Daughters (2023), a hybrid documentary that wove actors into an otherwise nonfiction feature, won both the Independent Spirit Award and the Gotham Award before earning an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary Feature. The Man Who Sold His Skin (2021), her acclaimed fiction film, was nominated for Best International Feature.
In this event, Ben Hania discusses how she blurs the line between fiction and documentary to create groundbreaking, often unclassifiable work. The session includes an audience Q&A with Ben Hania. Don’t miss your chance to hear from the writer/director behind one of the most socially urgent films of 2025.
SpotlightTeam
Kaouther Ben Hania
Kaouther Ben Hania is a two-time Academy Award–nominated filmmaker whose bold, inventive, and deeply human storytelling has established her as a leading voice in international cinema, continuing to redefine the boundaries of nonfiction and fiction filmmaking.
Her most recent project, The Voice of Hind Rajab, has followed its Venice Film Festival Silver Lion win with major acclaim, including a Golden Globe nomination for Best Motion Picture – Non-English Language. Selected as Tunisia’s official submission for Best International Feature, the film is executive produced by Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Jonathan Glazer, and Alfonso Cuarón, and has been named one of the Best Movies of 2025 by The New York Times, Rolling Stone, and AP. The film is based on the events of January 29, 2024, when volunteers at the Palestine Red Crescent were alerted to call a 5-year-old girl trapped in a car in Gaza and did everything they could to keep her on the line and get an ambulance to her. Using the original audio from that day, Ben Hania builds a devastating hybrid of fact and fiction performed by Palestinian actors who listened to Hind’s real voice as they filmed.
Ben Hania’s past work includes the Independent Spirit and Gotham Award-winning documentary Four Daughters, which received the l’Oeil d’Or in the main competition at the Cannes Film Festival and an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature. Using an audacious formal conceit whereby her missing daughters are portrayed by professional actors, the film tells the story of Olfa Hamrouni and her four daughters, examining why the Tunisian woman’s two eldest were radicalized in Libya, and the ripple effects it had on their family.
In addition, following her breakthrough Cannes debut in the ACID section with Challat of Tunis in 2014, her 2017 feature Beauty and the Dogs won the Best Sound Creation Award in Cannes’ Un Certain Regard, while her 2021 film The Man Who Sold His Skin was nominated for the Academy Award for Best International Feature and earned the Best Actor prize in the Horizons section of the 2020 Venice Film Festival. Her body of work also includes acclaimed documentaries and shorts such as Zaineb Hates the Snow and Wooden Hand.
Soheil Rezayazdi
Moderator | Digital Course & Event Producer
Soheil Rezayazdi is a Digital Course & Event Producer at the Sundance Institute, where he produces multi-session courses, master classes, filmmaker Q&As, and other digital programs for Sundance Collab. Prior to Sundance, Soheil served as the Nonfiction Programs Manager at the Gotham Film & Media Institute. He oversaw the Gotham’s core documentary programs: the Documentary Feature Lab, the Spotlight on Documentaries project market, and the Documentary Development Initiative in partnership with HBO Documentary Films. Soheil has worked with emerging filmmakers since 2015, when he began a seven-year tenure at the Columbia University MFA Film Program. At Columbia he managed the Columbia University Film Festival (CUFF), the Dr. Saul and Dorothy Kit Film Noir Festival, and the Carla Kuhn Memorial Speaker Series.
Soheil is also a freelance writer on film and pop culture with articles in Indiewire, McSweeney’s, Vice, Filmmaker Magazine, Documentary Magazine, Paper, Paste, and elsewhere. He has also served as an external reviewer for artist programs operated by Creative Capital, Kartemquin Pictures, Chicken & Egg Pictures, and the International Documentary Association. A native of Iran, he holds an MA in journalism and a BA in film studies from the University of Iowa.