In the grand, nauseating theater of human suffering, there is a recurring character that is perhaps more exhausting than the butchers themselves: the empathetic auteur. Enter Kaouther Ben Hani, the Tunisian director who has discovered the philosopher’s stone of the twenty-first century: the ability to convert the agonizing final moments of a six-year-old girl into a fifteen-minute 'Oscar hopeful.' The project, titled 'The Voice of Hind Rajab,' focuses on the death of a Palestinian girl in Gaza—a tragedy so profound and complete that it apparently required the intervention of a film crew to make it palatable for the champagne-and-canapé circuit of international awards season.

Ben Hani recently remarked that making this film was a way to 'not feel helpless.' It is a fascinating insight into the modern ego—the notion that the primary victim of a geopolitical slaughter is the bystander’s sense of efficacy. To the director, the existential dread of watching a child be liquidated by the machinery of war is not a call to radical, uncomfortable action, but rather a prompt for a creative exercise. It is the ultimate luxury of the safe: the ability to process the screams of the dying through a high-definition lens and a carefully color-graded edit, all to ensure that one’s own conscience remains comfortably buoyant. The director’s 'helplessness' is cured by the production schedule; the child, meanwhile, remains dead. It is a parasitic relationship masked as a tribute, a way to feed the industry’s bottomless hunger for 'important' content while doing absolutely nothing to halt the momentum of the missiles.

Let us look at the reality of Hind Rajab, a name that transitioned from a desperate plea on a phone line to a hashtag, and finally to a script. She was trapped in a car, surrounded by the corpses of her family, pleading with dispatchers for hours while the bureaucratic gears of war ground her into the pavement. It is a story that should, by all rights, break the brain of anyone who hears it. But the film industry does not like broken brains; it likes broken hearts that can be mended by a soaring score and a 'Best Live Action Short' nomination. The Left will champion this as 'essential viewing,' a phrase used by people who want to feel virtuous without ever leaving their climate-controlled apartments. They will sit in the dark, dabbing their eyes with organic cotton handkerchiefs, convinced that their $20 ticket price is a blow against the military-industrial complex. They confuse the act of witnessing with the act of intervening, a delusion that the film industry is more than happy to monetize.

The Right, of course, will respond with their customary blend of callousness and strategic amnesia. They will call the film 'propaganda' while ignoring the literal recordings of a child begging for her life, or they will justify the carnage as the 'unfortunate cost' of a geopolitical chess game they aren’t even playing. To them, Hind Rajab is not a child but a data point to be discarded in favor of a larger narrative of civilizational struggle. They find the film annoying not because it is exploitative, but because it briefly interrupts their lunch with the inconvenient reality of their own moral bankruptcy. Both sides of the political aisle use the child as a prop: one to signal their superior empathy, the other to prove their 'toughness.' In the end, the girl in the car is forgotten, replaced by the discourse surrounding her.

We are currently trapped in a cycle of aestheticized horror. We live in a world where the most horrific events are viewed as 'raw material' for the next awards cycle. Ben Hani’s need to 'not feel helpless' is the driving force of the prestige economy. If we can make a movie about it, we have 'dealt' with it. We have 'raised awareness.' Raising awareness is the favorite hobby of the useless; it is the act of pointing at a fire and expecting the act of pointing to extinguish the flames. This film, like so many before it, will likely be praised for its 'bravery.' But where is the bravery in filming a reconstruction of a death that has already occurred? The bravery would be in admitting that our art is a shield we use to protect ourselves from the reality of our own irrelevance. We watch these films to feel like we are part of the solution, when in reality, we are just the audience for the funeral.

Ultimately, 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' will fulfill its purpose. It will screen at festivals, it will garner 'buzz,' and it may even land a gold statuette on a mantelpiece in a quiet, safe home far from the rubble of Gaza. The director will feel less helpless, the audience will feel more informed, and the industry will feel more relevant. And tomorrow, another child will scream into a phone, another car will be shredded, and another director will reach for their camera, eager to cure their helplessness with a fresh batch of cinematic grief. It is the circle of life, if by 'life' we mean the profitable curation of death.