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.