Art & Culture

Saja Kilani on Arab Womanhood, Grief, and the Role That Broke All Of Us

BYMeriem Belhiba

November 28, 2025

Saja Kilani is meeting Arab audiences in a moment that feels bigger than a debut. Earlier this year, she premiered SimSim at the sixth edition of the Amman Film Festival— her first lead role in a feature and the first film ever produced in Irbid, Jordan— a project she still speaks about with the kind of affection reserved for formative experiences. But her true regional introduction came through The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania’s Venice-premiering docudrama that earned a record-breaking 23-minute standing ovation, toured sold-out screenings across Europe and the U.S., and opened the 2025 Doha Film Festival in the presence of Hind’s mother and the Palestinian Red Crescent team who received the call that day.

In the film, Kilani plays Rana, a Palestinian Red Crescent worker whose voice steadies a terrified six-year-old girl in her final hours. It is a role that asks for emotional honesty, and Kilani meets it with a quiet steadiness that feels instinctive, and almost lived. For many viewers across the Arab world, this is the first time they see her on screen, and the introduction is intimate and painfully human.

Off screen, Kilani is just as thoughtful. Raised between Jordan and Canada, she speaks in English but says she “dreams in Arabic,” a sentiment that reveals how her identity operates: layered, inherited, never entirely in one place. She doesn’t posture or oversell herself. Instead, she reflects on memory, womanhood, language, and the emotional labour behind telling stories rooted in grief and resistance. Sitting with her, you understand why both films — one already premiered, one travelling the world — feel like the start of a career shaped not by exposure, but by intention.

You’re debuting The Voice of Hind Rajab to a major Arab audience for the first time. What has it been like bringing the film to Doha Film Festival?

Saja Kilani: It’s been incredibly heartwarming. Doha brought us all together in a way no other festival has — the entire Red Crescent team, Hind’s mother, the cast, the people who lived this story in real time. This was our first time meeting many of them face-to-face. That alone makes the experience deeply emotional. You feel the weight of the story differently when the people who lived it are sitting beside you.

In a poem you wrote, you’ve described your relationship to language by saying, “I speak in English, but I dream in Arabic.” How does that shape the way you see yourself and your work?

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SJ: Dreaming, for me, is where everything begins— manifestation, goals, the core of who you are. So when I say I dream in Arabic, it means that the foundation of my emotional world is rooted in that language. Even if my daily life often happens in English, the part of me that feels, remembers, and hopes is grounded in Arabic. That’s where my instincts come from.

For a long time, I wondered if using English so much distanced me from my identity. I don’t think that anymore. I think in Arabic first and translate consciously, and that process has become part of who I am. English is easier for me because I spent 12 years in Canada, but it doesn’t make me “less Arab.” Language is a part of culture, not its entirety, and I’ve learned to see bilingualism as something that completes me rather than divides me.

You often speak about the emotional inheritance you carry as a Palestinian-Jordanian woman. How does that history appear in your work?

SJ: My connection to Palestine comes from memory rather than geography. I’ve never visited, but I grew up with my grandparents’ stories; the memories they refused to let go of. They gave me a version of Palestine that was personal and lived, and that shaped the way I understand identity. History, for me, is memory, and cinema allows those memories to take shape as images rather than only as words.

I also grew up surrounded by strong women, and that shaped how I view Arab womanhood. In my work, I see vulnerability as strength. I’ve witnessed women apologize for being emotional, including Rana — the woman I portray — and I found that incredibly powerful. Those emotional moments teach me a lot about how women navigate the world. When I bring a character to life, I’m informed by that mixture of tenderness and resilience.

SimSim premiered at the Amman Film Festival as the first feature ever produced in Irbid. What did it mean for you to lead a film rooted so specifically in Jordanian reality?

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SJ: SimSim came to me at a moment when I needed to grow as an actor. She’s a working-class Jordanian woman fighting for a divorce in a system that doesn’t make it easy for women like her. That struggle — the emotional and social weight of it — was something I wanted to explore honestly. She’s very different from me, but parts of her reminded me of the strength I see in the women around me.

Preparing for the role was like going back to film school. I had to learn the Irbid dialect and understand the rhythms and realities of the world she comes from. It was hands-on, technical, immersive — something that shaped me deeply. Simsim challenged me, but she also grounded me. She made me think a lot about the women who carry so much quietly, and about how much courage it takes to claim your own life.

You play characters who carry heavy emotional weight. How do you prepare for roles that demand this level of intensity, and how do you protect yourself while doing it?

SJ: For me, preparation always begins with direct connection. When I played Rana, I spoke to her personally, and she was extremely generous in sharing her story with me. We became friends. That connection was my main research; nothing could have matched hearing the events from her perspective. But once I was on set, it was Hind’s voice that guided me. Acting is reacting, and my job was simply to listen to her and respond honestly.

The emotional difficulty was real, and the way we handled it was by building a family on set. We spent time together on and off set, and that closeness made a huge difference. It created an environment where we could support each other through the heaviness of the material. Even now, we’re still very close. As for therapy, I think it’s important — it’s more about finding the time for it than anything else.

There is ongoing conversation about the kinds of roles offered to Arab women. What roles do you hope to take on, and what roles do you hope to move beyond?

SJ: I hope we move away from stereotypical portrayals — the weak woman, the submissive woman, the victim. These roles don’t reflect the Arab women I’ve met in my life. They’re far from the reality I know, and I think audiences deserve more complexity. I want to see Arab women represented in ways that match who we actually are: layered, strong, emotional, contradictory, human.

As for what I want to play, the answer is everything. Thriller, action, drama, romance — I want to explore it all. As Arabs, Palestinians, humans, we deserve to tell all kinds of stories, not just stories of pain. I’m drawn to roles with depth and contradictions, like Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich. Characters like that interest me because they feel real. I don’t want to be limited to one kind of narrative or one kind of woman.

Saja Kilani on Arab Womanhood, Grief, and the Role That Broke All Of Us

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Saja Kilani on Arab Womanhood, Grief, and the Role That Broke All Of Us

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