The Voice of Hind Rajab made an immediate impact when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2025, receiving a 23-minute standing ovation and seven awards. More were to follow as it played at festivals around the world.
It’s a mixture of documentary and drama that tells the story of a Palestinian girl trapped in a car during the conflict with Israel. Its writer and director, Kaouther Ben Hania, is from Tunisia. Nominated for a 2026 Oscar in the Best International Feature Film category, this is her third shortlisting at the awards.
So, what makes The Voice of Hind Rajab so powerful? We asked a leading scholar of north African film and film-makers, Florence Martin, to tell us about the film and its director.
How did you feel when you left the cinema the first time you saw the film?
I left the cinema shattered, with a weighty feeling of utter powerlessness that rendered me voiceless. A fellow viewer asked to speak with me, and I gestured no. I could not.
I was haunted by the voice of Hind, or Hanood as her mother called her, a disembodied voice that is at the centre of the story, the scared voice of a frightened six-year-old little girl trapped in a car, for whom nothing could be done.
I had been the belated witness of the long hours of the Red Crescent workers to try and save her, and although all the viewers knew how it would end, the punch of powerlessness we felt was a jolt.
What’s the story about?
On 29 January 2024, the Red Crescent relief volunteers in Ramallah receive an emergency phone-call asking them to rescue a little girl, Hind Rajab, who is trapped in a car in Gaza. The car has been under fire and all other passengers (members of her family) are dead. The volunteers keep her on the line for hours as they are desperately trying to send an ambulance her way.
The story also gives viewers insights on the absurd conditions that prevail in the siege of Gaza by Israel. For instance, the Red Crescent call centre for Gaza is actually over 80km away in Ramallah, in the West Bank, since all phone lines in Gaza were destroyed in a bombardment.
In order to send an ambulance to Gaza, the volunteers have to get the itinerary of the ambulance approved by the Israeli army, and only the Jordanian government is trained to negotiate with the Israeli army for such an approval. As you may well imagine, tragic and Kafkaesque bureaucratic miscommunications and delays ensue.
What makes it so powerful?
Interestingly enough, what makes it powerful is not necessarily the reconstitution of an episode of a war in progress, but rather the filming of the reenactment of the volunteers’ conversations with Hind and of their feelings throughout her ordeal.
At first, the viewer may be turned off by a film in an enclosed space for 90 minutes, but the Red Crescent space mirrors the claustrophobic place from which Hind speaks.
It is not a straight documentary – none of Ben Hania’s are – but rather a docufiction, a documentary in which she asked actors to play the roles of the volunteers in the Ramallah centre.
The night I saw the film in Paris, Ben Hania briefly came to introduce it. She explained, as she has in many interviews, that her formal choice was dictated by a truth imperative:
We have to experience what the Palestinians experience when they work for the Red Crescent and receive a call, and whose job is to save lives.
She continued:
And we have to understand the impossibility of this work under occupation by design; how occupation makes their lives impossible and literally makes this little girl’s life impossible.
The actors reenact these moments and at times no longer seem to act, but to feel the urgency of Hind’s voice. The directing of the actors at some point seems to be suspended and the characters take over the actors in extraordinarily powerful scenes. In some ways, then, it is not Hind who is in the limelight, but the volunteers who try everything in their power, and sometimes even fight with each other as they struggle to find ways to rescue her.
In a total reversal of classic cinema codes, the star of the film remains a dead little girl’s voice, deprived of a body. Hind Rajab remains off screen, obviously, except for a picture of her tacked onto the wall by one of the volunteers who cannot stand her absence and the danger she is in.
Yet she is the star, the one whose voice still haunts this viewer long after she left the cinema.
How does it fit into Ben Hania’s body of work?
This is her third feature documentary, after Challat of Tunis (2013) and Four Daughters (2023), both of which were rooted in Tunisia, although Four Daughters had a transnational dimension.
Read more:
Four Daughters is a Tunisian masterpiece – what makes the film groundbreaking
It also comes after Ben Hania’s fiction film that ventured out of the borders of Tunisia, The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020), and offered a story at the intersection of the global art world and the plight of refugees in Europe.
In other words, Ben Hania does not shy away from global preoccupations, transnational subjects. In this film, however, she has gone one step further in her quest to reach an empathetic, female gaze that never objectifies the characters in front of the camera.
In Four Daughters, she had proposed a new apparatus for her documentary. She had actors in dialogue with the real characters, at times re-enacting scenes, at other times breaking the fourth wall to react to the characters or their scenes in extremely moving moments. (The fourth wall is the invisible divide between the performers on screen and the audience.)
Read more:
To cry or not to cry: how moving the audience to tears can backfire
This time, the actors feel and act the parts of the characters (the Red Crescent volunteers) and the viewer experiences the feelings not of Hind Rajab but of the adults desperate to save her. The documentary is no longer about facts (although it is entirely factually verifiable), but about the truth of the characters and their story.
Here, Ben Hania proposes a new type of film that no longer breaks the fourth wall but breaks the distance between the screen and the viewer through something as ineffable and difficult to describe as deeply felt human connections.
Is there anything you didn’t like about it?
Unfortunately, yes. The end, a break from the filmic narrative, features a few minutes of classic reporting style which are superfluous, in my opinion.
I didn’t need to see images of the car riddled with bullets nor images of corpses wrapped in shrouds side by side on the ruined ground of Gaza. I fail to see what this brings to an otherwise revolutionary new way of making a woman’s documentary.
