“I cited the tears, never the spit,” the Palestinian writer Mohammed El-Kurd writes in Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal, adding: “You need to be polite in your suffering, should you be granted the right to a roof over your head.”

The politics of representation in popular culture often feels like a plea from the margins. It masks a grotesque gesture: to be accepted. Representation politics, then, quickly metastasises into respectability politics, where filmmakers marshal a polished and sanitised self that can be considered worthy of pity, hopefully of dignity, and eventually, of rights. Characters condense into ideas; they become easier, with loftier morals, and less complicated to talk about, defend, and argue for. A story becomes a position, the character, an ideal, and cinema, the shoulder the film shoots from.

It is not surprising then that the writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania would be drawn to the story of Hind, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl murdered by the Israel Defense Forces during their invasion of the Gaza Strip in January 2024. Hind was trapped in a car with the bodies of her six relatives. Rescuers from the Palestine Red Crescent, keeping contact with her over the phone, tried to reach her with an ambulance but failed when that, too, was bombed.

It was only 12 days later, after Israel withdrew, that the bodies were retrieved. The windows of the car had been blown out, the doors pockmarked with bullet holes. The Red Crescent ambulance, a few feet away, was completely destroyed.

Hind’s voice was telecast to the world and became totemic of Israel’s genocidal excess. In the phone call, she states clearly that the bodies lying next to her are not “asleep” but “dead”. The sound of advancing gunfire in the background of her quivering voice falls into our lives as the swansong of a collective universal conscience, the one we tried to create in the aftermath of the Second World War. (A swansong that keeps getting sung with every new act of menace, might I add.) Children, symbolic of all that is precious, innocent, and hopeful, are easier subjects to forcefully and unambiguously draw empathy for, invoke guilt for, and perhaps elicit something deeper than exhaustion. But stories must raise the bar higher.

Not a girl but a symbol

I am not asking for something morally complex here. Some stories exist within the neatness of villainy and heroism. But films like Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025) mistake narrative flatness for moral clarity. The desire to memorialise people is a dangerous impulse because it hinges on their dehumanisation. Hind emerges not as a girl but a symbol, with the film uninterested in doing the more real work of making life emerge from a bit of dialogue.

Besides, there is something structurally unsound about the film. It uses Hind’s voice recording throughout but is ultimately a chamber piece, set entirely in the rescue centre where the staff are trying to organise her safety, filling the gaps with their anxieties, anger, and frustration. It is a horrifying choice because it displaces her urgency with their impatience and replaces Hind’s anxiety with that of the workers, all of whom can only express themselves in shrill gasps punctuating repetitive outbursts. Their screen monitors, polished floors, glass doors, perfectly ironed shirts and abayas serve as a curated stage—and unmet challenge—to evoke the violence of the world beyond.

Ben Hania’s previous film, the suppurating documentary Four Daughters (2023), probed deep into the domestic life of a mother and her two daughters in Tunisia. There are two more daughters, who are absent, for they were radicalised and fled to join the Daesh. They are re-enacted by actors. The reel and real bodies collide in troubling ways that upend narrative clarity—even the narratives the mother tells herself about her motherhood—and shroud that which must be revealed but which does not have the vocabulary of revelation. In The Voice of Hind Rajab, the hybrid method is so sure of its effect that it does not even bother to recognise the fact that the easy access to easy emotions might, in fact, be a mirage, clouding what was really a horseshoe bend.

The Voice of Hind Rajab did the festival circuit, collecting anecdotes about weeping audiences in Venice, Toronto, and San Sebastián. Guilt becomes currency in states that peddle violence. In America, the film struggled to get a distributor on board as it tried to gather steam as a nominee in the Best International Feature Film category at the Academy Awards, where it ultimately lost. There has been chatter about an active campaign to discredit the film’s chances, and this is as true as the film’s absence of force.

While The Voice of Hind Rajab takes place over a day, Cherien Dabis’ All That’s Left of You, also anchored to the body of a dead child, is a sweeping multigenerational tale. Instead of compressing its tension into a few critical hours, it looks back at three generations to explain how this body was put in this position in this place.

Memory is the film’s unreliable narrator and ammunition. Its characters refuse to speak, to remember, to forget, while also screaming, narrating too much, recasting past events into present insight. Speaking of the 1948 Nakba, a character who lived through it and was displaced from Jaffa, where he lovingly tended to his orange orchards, comments decades later: “They got rid of us because we are cowards. A country of cowards.” He is ageing, with amnesia setting in. The doctor comments that maybe the loss of memory is the gift of God. The film ends with the generation born of the Nakba leaving Palestine after the Intifada.

Leaving home

Leaving home is a defeat that plagues films like All That’s Left of You and the rousing Lebanese romantic drama A Sad and Beautiful World. In both, families decide to leave their countries torn apart by war and waste, and drop anchor elsewhere: Canada in the former, Dubai in the latter. “[D]efeat is no stranger. It arrives like a season.... Learn to meet it with an open face,” the anthropologist Shahram Khosravi writes in the essay “Defeat As Method”. “In truth, the only critical thinking possible today is thinking from the standpoint of the defeated,” he says. Drawing on the marsiya and the Black elegy as genres of defeat, Khosravi looks at defeat as an “ethical point of departure” in criticism.

It is romantic, this reframing of “pessimistic hope”, but I am not sure of the “radical” potential of defeat although I am certain of its capacity to comfort without resorting to resentment or historical ennui. Films offering remembrance are not archives of what can be gained but of what is well and truly lost, a loss for which there is no recompense.

Like the Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36, about the less known 1936–39 Arab revolt against British colonial rule, these films are not interested in presenting historic failure as something that can be corrected through cinema. They are not pleas for revenge. That is the miracle here. To be battered, again and again and again, and yet to draw the next breath without poison. Only a faint intention to live another day, to birth another generation.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.

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