The 2026 Oscars’ most vital moment won’t be Best Picture

Best Picture. Best Director. Best Actress. Best Actor. Best Screenplay. Known as the Oscars’ “Big Five,” these categories garner the most buzz leading up to and during the ceremony.

But it’s time to expand that list to include Best International Feature. At a moment when Americans are more exposed to global headlines — many of them delivered in real time through social media feeds — the category takes on added cultural weight.

Against the backdrop of the conflicts in Iran and Gaza, this year’s contenders — notably It Was Just an Accident and The Voice of Hind Rajab — offer intimate portraits of communities long flattened by Western political rhetoric and media coverage.

Directed by Iranian filmmaker Jafar Panahi, It Was Just an Accident follows a mechanic who kidnaps a man he believes tortured him in prison. Meanwhile, Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, based on a true story, documents Red Crescent volunteers’ attempts to save a five-year-old girl from an Israeli military attack in Gaza. Panahi and Jacir use cinema to encourage conversation and evoke feelings — anger, grief, curiosity — that go beyond passive and biased headlines. The directors throw viewers into the thick of the action, portraying characters as fully realized people with inner lives and families, not just names.

That these stories are being showcased on one of the world’s most visible stages matters. With millions of viewers tuning in, the ceremony — and, by extension, the film industry — can be a powerful tool for legitimizing the experiences of marginalized communities.

This is especially true for Palestinians, whose displacement and occupation have often been filtered through coverage that, as analysts have documented, distorts their lived experience. One of the US’ most storied news organizations, the New York Times, has been the subject of multiple studies and backlash over its biased coverage of the Middle East. But it is hardly alone in reflecting these patterns. Decades of research have asserted similar findings across US and UK news coverage more broadly, with people in the Middle Eastern region often portrayed in dehumanizing ways.These narratives also extend to depictions in movies and television. In a 2021 USC Annenberg study analyzing 200 popular films, Muslim characters accounted for only 1.6 % of speaking roles. When they were portrayed, they were often racially profiled, with over 51.1% of Muslim characters appearing only in films set in the past. The media can heavily shape public perception of others, influencing the level of sympathy people receive and whether they are viewed as heroes or villains. Shows such as Showtime’s Homeland widen the gap between understanding and demonizing the Middle East through clichéd portrayals, whereas the Netflix Inc. series Mo and the Oscar-submitted All That’s Left of You thoughtfully contextualize marginalized characters’ experiences without relying on tropes.

The films in this year’s International Feature category are powerful because of the compassion with which their stories and characters are imbued. In the case of The Voice of Hind Rajab, the humanity embedded in the film makes up for the media’s often undignified and passive treatment of the real-life event that inspired it. Rajab is no longer a girl who “has been found dead,” but a child who had a life full of hopes and fears and whose pleas will now echo in people’s hearts.

Crucially, both It Was Just an Accident and The Voice of Hind Rajab encourage the general public to seek out movies told from the perspectives of the people they portray rather than through a Western lens alone. It’s an important distinction. These films bring the unfiltered experiences of Palestinians and Iranians to audiences through a grounded, character-driven approach that avoids the shadow cast by the news cycle and the savior-style storytelling that often casts American characters as rescuers or teachers of minorities.

Movies and shows don’t have to be relatable to be understandable. They are magical that way. So, regardless of who takes home the coveted Oscar statuette, these films accomplish something larger: they restore dimension to people too often discussed and portrayed in the abstract.

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Mae Abdulbaki is a critic, entertainment journalist and podcaster. She has been a member of the Gotham Television Awards nominating committee and a juror at film festivals, including SXSW.

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