I love the art of filmmaking. But it breaks me when such artistic expressions fail to carry their momentum beyond the screen and into the real world that birthed them. Too often, our ‘activist’ energy stays confined to the safe, theatrical realm of the unreal.
At the Venice Film Festival, The Voice of Hind Rajab was met with applause, ovation, tears—but what next? That room contained enough influence, money, and media power to raise the world in defense of the defenseless. Instead, the applause will fade, the purpose will be forgotten, and the investors will count their ROI—another profit made from another atrocity. This is the great hypocrisy: Civilization fails, and we turn the collapse into cinema. A standing ovation becomes the only activism the film will ever achieve. Waving flags, holding pictures, clapping hands…
Nobody asks: who invested in this film? Where do the proceeds go? What path of action does it carve for its audience? Hollywood, and more importantly those who own it, know perfectly well that storytelling without spillover into reality is safe. It entertains. It shocks. It sells. It does not threaten. For the audience, film festivals have become rituals of sadism—dark boxes where we willingly sit to be tortured by horrors we’ll never touch, only to leave unchanged. We celebrate producers who push us further into imagined extremes, then head home satisfied, as if gasping in our seats was contribution enough.
But films were not meant for this. We did not begin telling stories to anesthetize or distract, but to awaken, remind, and empower. Storytelling is activist by origin, compassionate by essence. Somewhere along capitalism’s evolution, that essence was stripped away. What remains is spectacle: profit framed as purpose, horror packaged as art, shock sold as catharsis. Hind’s story—a child’s last terrified moments—becomes, in the hands of this system, a psychological thriller fit for the desensitized appetite of Hollywood. The heartbeat spike, the gasp, the nervous laugh, even the popcorn spilling, are all part of the experience. And then the lights rise, and the theater reminds us of what is real: millions spent to build the screen, millions more to stage the film, the oversized popcorn drenched in butter, stories that numb us. We are entertained, not transformed.
This is why the Compassiviste Film Awards matter. We must remind both producers and audiences that art is not judged by craft alone, but by its ability to transform the human spirit. Think of an elementary school mathematics book: a teacher helps children as young as Hind learn 2 + 1, and that lesson becomes the foundation for higher knowledge. Film should function the same way. It must not only show us the world’s brokenness, but point us toward how to mend it.
It is time to demand films that carve a runway of compassionate activism, that invite audiences not to passive consumption but to rehabilitation, reform, revolution, and healing. Otherwise, we are selling tap water as lemonade—stripping out the very ingredient that gives meaning, just to raise the margin. This is the grotesque efficiency of profit, the betrayal of purpose.
The hypocrisy of what we call compassion and activism must be exposed. A true revolution does not come from applause in the dark but from adjusting how we live when the lights come back on.
Hind is not coming back, nor will the many children who will follow her into the grave. But are we so powerless as a global public that we must sit back and accept such brutality? Is this how the Holocaust happened—we made documentaries, we applauded stories of horror, but failed to address it head on with active defiance? The same danger faces us again, and silence will be our complicity. As Martin Luther King Jr. reminded us, “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.” A film without activist spillover is nothing more than a silent film.
