Is Reality the Same as Art?

In the old days, when a movie drama had a topical urgency, we would say that it was “ripped from the headlines.” But that phrase is now beyond quaint. Today we’re in the age when a film with topical relevance can feel like it was ripped, torn and bleeding, from reality.

Two of the most high-profile movies of the 2025 fall film festival season powerfully illustrate that trend. “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” a tumultuous political docudrama that was a sensation in Venice (where it was awarded the number-two prize, the Silver Lion), re-creates a war-zone calamity that took place in Gaza on Jan. 29, 2024. “Nuremberg” is ripped from the headlines of 80 years ago — it’s about how the captured Nazi Hermann Göring was placed on trial for war crimes. Both movies are furious indictments, and it’s telling that both place documentary evidence at the epicenter of their drama.

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“The Voice of Hind Rajab” is set entirely within the glass-paned offices of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, where call-center volunteers field pleas from civilians trapped in the decimated hellhole that is Gaza. As the film unfolds in something close to real time, we follow the terrifying saga of Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old girl who is sitting trapped and hidden in her family’s car. Six of her family members lie dead and bloody around her (at first, she thinks they’re asleep). Can she be saved?

The workers stay on the phone with her, as Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), the office overseer, goes through the thankless task of securing approval (from the Red Cross outpost in Jerusalem) for an ambulance that’s just eight minutes away from the girl’s car to make the rescue mission. Unless he wins that approval, the ambulance itself will be a target for attack.

The audience never sees Hind Rajab (though we’re shown family photographs of her). But every time we hear her voice on the phone, it’s Rajab’s real voice (brave, scared, frantic, lost), all culled from a 70-minute recording that was made that day. This lends “The Voice of Hind Rajab” a unique and devastating this-is-really-happening urgency that the film is built around. The movie is its own hybrid, an inextricable weave of documentary and dramatization. And there are moments when it exerts its own special power. Yet as a dramatic experience, “The Voice of Hind Rajab” is at once cathartic and manipulative, lacerating and repetitive. In a real way, the film is bringing the news (of the heartlessness of Israel’s massacre-with-no-end). Yet the effect is akin to watching something that’s at once art and agitprop. The increasingly fraught scenes with the actors playing the Red Crescent volunteers don’t necessarily build in power. Our focus on that lone haunted voice — a little girl who literally doesn’t know what’s happening — drives the movie and, in the end, transcends it.

“Nuremberg” is all about how Hermann Göring (Russell Crowe), the number-two Nazi under Hitler, was placed on trial after World War II by the first international war-crimes tribunal. The movie, which premiered in Toronto, is a stately, polished, old-school drama of good and evil, with a lusciously traditional performance by Rusell Crowe as Göring (he’s good, though he doesn’t rock the boat.) But the movie turns out to have a historical shock-value card up its sleeve.

When “Nuremberg” finally reaches the courtroom, it demonstrates how documentary footage of the Nazi concentration camps was presented to the world, for the first time, at the Nuremberg trials. And the film itself stops in its tracks to show us five or six uninterrupted minutes of actual footage shot in the death camps (the piles of corpses, a walking human skeleton).

The decision to include that footage appears to have sprung from the filmmakers’ conviction that people, now more than ever, need to see this history. For the first time, an event as central to our culture as the Holocaust is receding in the collective memory. In that sense, “Nuremberg” does something responsible by reminding viewers of the profound horror of the Nazi crimes. Yet the hideous power of that footage has the ironic effect of diminishing the cat-and-mouse drama around it (will Rami Malek’s Army psychiatrist outwit Göring like Clarice Starling trying to psych out Hannibal Lecter? Will Göring find a way to squirm out of the death penalty?). It makes the rest of the movie seem all the more corny and…movie-ish.

In “The Voice of Hind Rajab” and “Nuremberg,” we are hit — singed — by the raw evidence of history. Yet both films, in different ways, raise the same question: Is all of this actually powerful filmmaking? Or is it an inadvertent demonstration of how the force of dramatic filmmaking can pale next to the power of reality?

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