Two films, distant yet mirroring each other from opposing perspectives, have arrived at Venezia 82: L’Étranger by François Ozon and The Voice of Hind Rajab by Kaouther Ben Hania.
The first revisits the 1942 novel in which Albert Camus gave shape to the philosophy of the absurd. In a colonial Algiers rife with tension, Meursault – played by rising talent Benjamin Voisin – emerges as a stranger both to the world and to himself: incapable of sharing common feelings, lucid to the point of guilt, at once victim and executioner in a society that cannot bear his disarming honesty. Ozon, faithful to the text, translates Camus’s merciless light into images with a black-and-white film that drains reality of its vitality, rendering the sun both beauty and condemnation. Here the absurd becomes fate; the individual’s sacrifice reflects a society incapable of welcoming those who expose the illusion of meaning.
To recount the dramatic story of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old girl trapped under a car in Gaza who called the Red Crescent in a one-hour plea for help, the director chose to use the original audio of the call. Completed in just twelve months, the film is set entirely in a sin...
Algiers, 1938. Meursault (Benjamin Voisin), a quiet and detached clerk, attends his mother’s funeral without showing any emotion. The next day he begins a relationship with Marie (Rebecca Marder), a co-worker, and soon slips back into his daily routine. But when his neighbor...
A completely different register marks the Tunisian director’s work, which brings to the screen a terrible truth: the story of six-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, trapped in her relatives’ car after they were killed in January 2024 in Gaza during an Israeli army attack. It is an absolute document, the very voice of humanity grappling with Evil itself. Hind pleads over the phone with the Red Crescent, which cannot save her. Around this harrowing real recording of Hind’s voice, Ben Hania builds a film of rare power, where everything that is war and death remains off-screen – yet more present than any visible evidence. If absolute evil exists, one must look here, in this madness: a human voice refusing to surrender to the absurd until the end, when rescuers finally arrive, powerless before the tragic images. Waiting, silence, the noise of weapons – these are the fraudulent sounds of a world failing to protect its future.
Between the two films a philosophical gap opens: the absurd of Camus and Ozon as a universal category – man discovering himself as a stranger, guilty before life’s lack of meaning – and the historical absurdity of what some conceptualize as a semi-genocide, whose definition remains debated, but which cinema delivers to the moral memory of humanity. Ozon delves into the roots of European existentialism; Ben Hania records the ethical urgency of an unacceptable present. Both compel us to look: whether in Meursault’s dry eyes or Hind’s broken voice, cinema once again becomes the place where the impossibility of making sense of the world finds its most necessary form.
