The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025)
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
Screenplay: Kaouther Ben Hania
Cinematography: Qutaiba Barhamji, Juan Sarmiento G.
Editing: Maxime Mathis, Kaouther Ben Hania
Music: Amin Bouhafa
Cast: Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Clara Khoury, Amer Hlehel
Plot: January 29, 2024. Volunteers from the Red Crescent receive an emergency call: a six-year-old girl, trapped in a car under gunfire in Gaza, is begging to be rescued. Staying on the line with her, clinging to her desperate voice, they do everything in their power to reach her. Her name was Hind Rajab.
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The opening of The Voice of Hind Rajab takes place on a rooftop: men and women laugh and joke during a work break, some wearing red windbreakers, their smiles silent. It is the only moment in the film where we glimpse the “outside.” Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania—riding on the global success of Four Daughters and its Oscar nomination—brought this new work to competition in Venice, with Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, and Alfonso Cuarón credited as executive producers. Their support is more than symbolic: it is a statement of intent, another sign of the film world’s increasingly explicit stance on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.
The film tells the story of Hind Rajab, the Palestinian child who became a symbol of the massacre of Gaza’s civilian population. The “voice” of the title is hers—recorded in January 2024 by the Red Crescent’s emergency line. Her cousin had managed to call just before dying, leaving Hind alone, trapped in the car with their relatives, all killed by the Israeli army. Ben Hania builds her film on the original recording of that call (what we hear throughout the film is the real voice of Hind, already partly circulated on social media at the time), paired with a fictional reconstruction of the humanitarian organization’s headquarters—a choice as fraught as it is daring.
If cinema is still, always, “a moral question,” then reflecting on the relationship between representation and reality—as Ben Hania does here, continuing the exploration of hybrid forms begun in Four Daughters—means taking on a colossal risk. Yet the choice is deliberate. Her aim is to pair a political use of the medium with an inquiry into the most intimate repercussions of that reality. She does so through radical simplification compared to her previous film, making the construct explicit, essential, and painfully transparent. At the Venice press conference, the director wore a pin with the single word enough, encapsulating the profound dismay at what continues to unfold daily in the occupied territories. That ethos guides her effort to sidestep rhetoric and emotional blackmail, focusing instead on facts and setting herself the “simple” goal of amplifying Hind’s voice.
By closing the film within four walls—letting the girl’s voice cut through, leaving everything else off-screen, and entrusting the abyssal unrepresentability of reality to sound alone—Ben Hania creates a dialogue between fact and staging. The film begins as pure narrative, sketching a handful of characters against a stripped-down set, hinting only at their personalities, before sliding into re-enactment, with actors reconstructing the rescue operations word for word. The story moves forward within those walls, recounting the race against time, against protocol, and against the endless loops of procedure required for safety. The very impossibility of action takes shape on screen: movements retraced again and again, like a marker circling back on glass, or like a planned shift across a map projecting a city that no longer exists—its intersections, its homes, its lives erased, surviving only as a photograph pinned to a wall.
Then the film shifts again, veering closer to documentary, as images of the real people at the heart of the story merge with their fictional doubles. This move pushes the viewer “outside” once more, confronting them with the silent, unrepresentable ruins of a reality dangerously at risk of normalisation through relentless, daily mediatization—a condition entrenched since the invasion of Ukraine. It is a reality that, as Ben Hania reminds us through cinema, demands we reposition ourselves.
Chiara Borroni, Cineforum, September 24, 2025
