A still from The Voice of Hind Rajab.
In the new docudrama The Voice of Hind Rajab, the voice is everything – and that voice is distressingly real. Hind Rajab was the five-year-old Palestinian girl who, on 29 January 2024, spoke on the phone to a Palestine Red Crescent emergency call centre in Ramallah, on the West Bank; she was 52 miles away in Gaza, alone in a car with six of her relatives, five of them dead amid fire from the Israeli army. Hind, together with an older cousin, was later herself found dead, along with two members of a Red Crescent ambulance crew dispatched to rescue her. The girl’s pleas for rescue, recorded over three hours, provide the unnerving thread that runs through The Voice of Hind Rajab, by Tunisian writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania – and the voice we hear over the line really is that of Hind herself.
Ben Hania’s compelling and intensely troubling film premiered last autumn at the Venice film festival, where it won the Grand Jury prize and received a 23-minute standing ovation. That it was presented to the public only 18 months after the events depicted is testimony to the urgency the project represented for Ben Hania. She was already working on another feature when in February 2024, a month after Hind’s ordeal, she heard the excerpts of the voice recordings that had been posted online by the Red Crescent; she immediately interrupted work on that film to tell the girl’s story.
“Kaouther was rocked to the core by hearing Hind’s voice,” says the film’s British producer James Wilson, known for his work with Jonathan Glazer (including Oscar winner The Zone of Interest) and Lynne Ramsay. “She felt she had to respond as a film-maker. So she approached the Red Crescent, and she won their trust.”
The organisation itself was involved in the film’s making, giving Ben Hania access to their audio. The action takes place entirely in the Red Crescent call centre as members of the response team, played by Palestinian actors, attempt to maintain contact with Hind and secure a safe route for a rescue attempt – something that organisational protocol makes painfully difficult.
Ben Hania creates the impression of continuous action in real time, while in fact compressing the three-hour duration of the actual events into 89 extremely tense minutes. Her script contains some imaginative dramatisation, notably depicting frayed-nerve confrontations between members of the team, all based on Ben Hania’s extensive interviews with the Red Crescent workers involved. “The debates and the emotion,” Wilson explains, “follow what the real people told her. But everything they say on the phone is exactly verbatim what was said on the calls.”
We wanted the film not to be niched as an Israel-bashing polemic or a protest film, but to feel like a universal anti-war humanist film
One element that makes the film so powerful, indeed painful, is that the voice we hear over the phone really is that of Hind, from the original recording. The decision to use her voice has been controversial, some critics seeing it as exploitative or ethically questionable. But for Ben Hania, the choice was clear. “From the beginning,” the director has commented, “I knew the recording … had to be central. I wanted to honour her voice.”
She did so with the permission of Hind’s mother, Wissam Hamada, who has supported the film by attending screenings but declined to watch the film itself as she felt it would be too painful.
For Wilson, the use of Hind’s voice was essential in making audiences connect with the reality faced by the population of Gaza. “Hearing one voice, making it individual – I felt that could be a radical rehumanising, against the dehumanising othering of Palestinians that enables the violence in the first place.”
In fact, he explains, “Ben Hania decided that her actors should not hear Hind Rajab’s recorded voice until the moment that filming began, when it was played to them over their characters’ headsets.
“Kaouther wanted them to be hearing the voice in the present tense – she wanted not to direct them, but to document their reaction as human beings, rather than in a performance. You are watching them respond to Hind's voice – they all said they felt they actually were talking to her, as if they did almost have a chance to rescue her.”
Wilson became involved with the project after he was approached by another of its producers, Odessa Rae, a Canadian whose credits include the acclaimed 2022 documentary Navalny. She recognised him because of the controversy around the speech that Jonathan Glazer gave at the Academy Awards in 2024 when The Zone of Interest won best international feature; Glazer was both attacked and praised at the time for protesting against Israel’s military assault on Gaza, which was then five months into its course following the 7 October Hamas attacks.
Rae asked Wilson whether he knew about Hind; he did, and had already heard the recordings. But he had not yet seen Ben Hania’s previous film, Four Daughters, about a Tunisian family in which two sisters join Daesh; it is a complex, provocatively Brechtian exercise whose real-life subjects interact with the performers playing them. When Wilson watched the film, he knew he wanted to work with Ben Hania. “With the fourth wall breaking, the meta, formal imagination – I thought, wow, this is a proper, serious kind of film-making. Here was a subject, and here was a film-maker interested in form.”
As The Voice of Hind Rajab approached its premiere, it became apparent that it would benefit from the support of influential names. “We weren’t naive about what the issues might be with a film in Arabic with Palestinian subject matter,” Wilson says, “particularly where, in certain parts of society, the attitude is censorious about expressing solidarity with the Palestinian trauma.
“We wanted the film not to be niched as an Israel-bashing polemic or a protest film, but to feel like a universal anti-war humanist film, whilst not shying away from the specificity of what it was.” Major names were approached, and by the time the film reached Venice, several had eagerly attached themselves to the project. Brad Pitt, Glazer, Alfonso Cuarón, Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara all signed up as executive producers – in this case, a role that essentially meant supporting the film as advocates (Phoenix and Mara joined Ben Hania and the film’s cast for its Venice premiere).
Now the official Tunisian entry in the Academy Awards, The Voice of Hind Rajab is sure to be hotly discussed as the awards season continues. But the campaign around the film is more serious than the usual eager “For Your Consideration” hustle. Earlier this week, Wilson joined Ben Hania, her long-standing French-Tunisian producer Nadim Cheikhrouha and actor Motaz Malhees, who plays Red Crescent worker Omar Alqam, in a panel discussion at the House of Lords; there have been similar events at the EU in Brussels and at the United Nations. The film’s team, along with Wissam Hamada, have also signed the open letter published this week calling for the restoration of medical aid in Gaza.
“Kaouther has talked about her response to the helplessness that she felt when she first heard Hind’s voice,” says Wilson. “I think it all comes out of that: turning the idea of cinema as an ‘empathy machine’ – that cliche – into something concrete.”
The Voice of Hind Rajab is in UK and Irish cinemas