Hend Sabry looks at every choice as if she’s planting a tree. “More trees,” she says, “make a healthier ecosystem". It’s how she approaches both her work and her life – raising daughters, choosing when to speak out, deciding when to walk away. The image is simple, but it has shaped the person she’s become.
The Tunisian actress and producer is a woman of intention. She’s also one of the region’s most singular voices – earning esteem few others reach – precisely because she’s so uncompromising. In an era when audiences expect more of their role models, that cultural shift has made her feel more essential than ever.
“We need to be the voices of the oppressed – of the people who cannot voice what is happening to them right now for so many reasons,” she says.
Sabry has shown, time and time again, that her words carry weight. In November 2023, when the ongoing crisis in Gaza had only just begun, she stepped away from her UN Goodwill Ambassadorship after 14 years because she felt the World Food Programme was not doing enough in response to the growing humanitarian catastrophe. And what has unfolded since has only reaffirmed her decision.
“I could tell this was not what I was used to. This was not what I did with them for 14 years. There was something different here that, to me, was a no-go. I'm not going to abide by the double standards,” Sabry explains.
As of late, Sabry has increasingly been thinking about how she became the woman she is today. It’s not a mystery she’s unravelling, rather a act of self-reflection. For the first time in her life, her greatest influence is no longer with her.
In July, Sabry’s mother Dalenda Klai passed away after a long battle with illness. And while she had time to ready herself for this moment, nothing really prepares you for such a loss. In the weeks since, she’s been struggling to parse the competing feelings that her mother’s absence has awoken in her.
“I’m working on my grief,” Sabry says. “I hope with time, it takes another shape – that it’s less intense after a while. It’s a blessing to have this much love for someone. It’s a gift. But it’s a painful one.”
In the years leading up to her mother’s passing, as her battle with her illness worsened and as conflicts in the region grew larger off in the distance, Sabry’s priorities have become starker. “I've been less and less willing to put my energy and my time in projects that don't really matter to me, and that's why I've been also less productive in the past couple of years,” she says.
When she does work, she’s been doing some of the best work of her career. Her 2023 collaboration with fellow Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, the genre-defying docudrama Four Daughters, earned an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary. And her Netflix series Finding Ola, a continuation of her beloved 2010 show Ayza Atgawez, is a light-hearted hit that portrays mature women from a perspective rarely seen in the Arab world. Both are fearless works of art, tackling taboos head on and generating conversations that push to the core of the human condition.
And now that she’s taken time to reflect in the wake of her mother’s passing, she’s been thinking back to how she grew so self-assured in the first place.
“I’m realising it even more now that she’s gone. She never judged me as a person, she accepted me as I was from the very beginning,” says Sabry.
“I think this is how you give a voice to women in our society: let her discover who she is. That freedom allows me to take risks even today, because I was not part of the social construct that expects all women to be the same, to act the same, to dress the same. My mother protected me from that, and I’m so grateful.”
Encouraging a young girl to become the most assured version of herself, is, at times, easier than it sounds. She’s felt that lesson most keenly as a mother herself. Both of her daughters are teenagers now, and she finds her greatest rival in helping them reach their own potential is social media.
“It’s dangerous, because while there are so many tools that help you be different, so much of it is about conforming. I worry about that, because the later in life that you find your voice, the harder it is to use it.
“I believe that life drags you to find yourself at some point. But if you start early on, with a family atmosphere that fosters that journey, then you end up living with a lot fewer regrets,” says Sabry.
Sometimes that requires a push. For Sabry, it certainly did. When she was 13 in the early 1990s, she and her parents attended a birthday party in Tunisia. There, she was spotted by filmmaker Nouri Bouzid, who had been writing a film called The Silences of the Palace at the time.
“He saw me, and he said to my father that I should come audition for the part, because I was the right age. And I responded: ‘no, I don’t want to go'. I wasn’t up for it at all,” she says.
“But my mum and dad really pushed me. They had no fear of what people were going to say, even though it was quite taboo back then in Tunisia to let your teenage daughter do a movie. It could have turned them into pariahs, but they didn’t care, because they thought it was best for me.
“Meanwhile, I just wanted to conform, like any other teenager. I was afraid of my friends at school. What would they say? They might say that I’m different, I thought. But my mother and father told me: ‘This is once in a lifetime opportunity. How many other people get to do this at 13?’ And they made me go to the audition, and helped me navigate through my fears,” Sabry continues.
Within a year, The Silences of the Palace, directed by Moufida Tlatli, won the Golden Camera award at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival – and won a 14-year-old Sabry Best Actress at the Carthage festival. It is now considered one of the best Arab films ever made, due in no small part to her contribution.
“I realised, ‘Oh, I must have some talent'. But it’s people that saw it in me, I did not see it at first. I wanted to be a lawyer or a diplomat,” says Sabry.
The biggest risk she ever took came six years later, when, at the age of 20, she moved to Egypt alone to pursue acting as a career. Once again, it was a move Sabry couldn’t have made without her mother. “In retrospect, I realise how much faith in me she had, and how much confidence in whatever my choices were,” she says.
As a result, she moved to Egypt with a far greater sense of herself than do most people starting off in the industry. Because of that, she keenly saw that just because she had left the arthouse for commercial fare, that did not give her a license to take her craft any less seriously.
“I saw the impact that I could have on people's lives. I'm driven by sharing experiences or sharing knowledge. Acting is a great tool for that. I think that's what drove me and made me fall in love with this craft. You can tell people watching each series: ‘You're not doing this alone. There are people who feel how you feel.’ Some of them are people who haven’t found their voices yet – and maybe my art can help them,” she says.
And her serious-mindedness attracted kindred spirits such as director Marwan Hamed, who cast her in the now-classic The Yacoubian Building when he was also in his twenties. Since then, the two have collaborated on several of the most ambitious and highest-grossing films in Egypt’s long cinematic history, from The Blue Elephant and its sequel to Kira & El Gin.
“Every generation has a group of people who band together and carry the voice of that generation. I feel very privileged to be a part of this generation of directors and actors who grew together and have been able to make movies that were not possible before we started out,” says Sabry.
Some of her greatest joy is in watching from afar as her collaborators grow to new heights. Hamed’s next film El Set is a biopic about the famed singer Umm Kulthum. Ben Hania’s latest film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, about the young girl in Gaza killed by Israel in January 2024, debuted at the Venice Film Festival this month. For both of them, she is bursting with pride – calling them fearless, invincible and visionary.
For Sabry, their success feels like part of the same forest she has been tending all along. Each choice, each risk, each refusal to compromise – they are all trees that make the ecosystem stronger. And though grief is reshaping her life in ways she has yet to discover, she knows the only way is to keep planting – knowing that her mother is still with her, holding the seeds.
“When you’re gone, what remains is the legacy of a person,” Sabry days. “My mother was a teacher, and over the past several weeks, I’ve received messages, emails and condolences from so many of her former students.
“All of them have said the same thing: That this teacher was different. She taught me to be myself. She believed in me when nobody did. Only certain types of people get to have a legacy like that.”
And as she moves forward into the next phase of her life, carrying her mother’s lessons more firmly than ever, Sabry is determined to build on that legacy – the one her mother dreamed for her, and the one she now dreams for others.
Her mother planted the first tree, and Sabry will continue to spend her life making sure the forest will outlast them both.
