![‘The Voice Of Hind Rajab’ Review: This Ripped From the Headlines Film About Gaza Will Rip Out Your Heart [Venice]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/18182126/The-Voice-Of-Hind-Rajab.jpg "‘The Voice Of Hind Rajab’ Review: This Ripped From the Headlines Film About Gaza Will Rip Out Your Heart [Venice]")
The first sight in director Kaouther Ben Hania’s “The Voice of Hind Rajab” is sound. The Tunisian filmmaker, Oscar-nominated for her hybrid documentary “Four Daughters,” gives over a significant portion of her new film to the visualization of a sonic waveform. That audio is an archival recording of a rescue call fielded by the Palestinian Red Crescent Society from a five-year-old girl, Hind Rajab. As she pleads for rescue from the car in which she’s trapped inside Gaza, it quickly becomes clear that no images are needed to convey the horror of the situation. Perhaps no images could ever be sufficient to convey the magnitude of this moral blemish on our world.
Taking in the staggering “The Voice of Hind Rajab” in its totality recalls something that filmmaker Osgood Perkins once observed about “The Zone of Interest” and its similarly bifurcated approach to image and sound. “There are two movies here, one that you can see and one you can only feel,” he wrote on Letterboxd, “Somehow you’re watching the movie they didn’t make.” Ben Hania observes a similar feat by refusing to relegate Hind’s tragedy to the realm of fiction. Instead, she builds a re-enactment of the attempts to rescue her around the real recording. It’s a mirror of the audience’s own position when confronted with the loss of young Palestinian life: morally moved to act but confined by Kafkaesque bureaucratic inertia.
“The Voice of Hind Rajab” is more than just a film; it’s a call to action. And in case there was any doubt, Ben Hania presented her work to the United Nations later that day, when this interview took place in early December. In conversation about her Oscar shortlisted entry in the Best International Feature category, Ben Hania discussed how she developed her aesthetic and storytelling approach, what cinema adds to the conversation about Gaza that social media can’t, and why she is comfortable with critics saying that no art can ever replace actual accountability.
When discussing “Four Daughters,” you mentioned not liking re-enactments and wanting to subvert those clichés. Since you’re working in a similar vein here, how have your feelings changed about this style within docu-fiction?
Every story proposes the best way to tell it to you. I was questioning how to tell this real story in the best way. For me, when I heard Hind Rajab’s voice for the first time, I had the impression that I was with the Red Crescent people because she was talking to them, saying, “Save me, get me out of here.” It was crucial to revisit this moment and portray it accurately. This emotion was what I wanted to share with the audience. How you go [back] to this moment is you bring actors, and they portray real characters.
The main idea was to base everything in the archive. And I had everything in the recording, from the killing of Layan, the cousin of Hind. We hear the bullets on her small body, and then all the conversation with Hind. And, at the end, we have the killing of the two paramedics in their ambulance. The bombing is in the sound. We spoke extensively with Red Crescent employees who were on the phone with Hind, as their perspective was crucial for me. Those people did everything to save Hind, followed all the rules, and yet paid a very heavy price because their colleagues were killed. This [perspective] is how I wanted to depict this story, because for me, the emotional impact is stronger when you go back to this moment when it was still possible to save Hind.
![‘The Voice Of Hind Rajab’ Review: This Ripped From the Headlines Film About Gaza Will Rip Out Your Heart [Venice]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/03233225/The-Voice-of-Hind-Rajab_Still_HERO-1024x583.jpg)
Your inspiration for the film was the call itself, but you also have a drama unfolding around the call center operators and their feelings of helplessness. How did researching the other side of the call shape the film?
I talked a lot with [the Red Crescent workers] Omar, Rana, Nisreen, and Mahdi. They were real partners in this movie because I had their voices in the recording, and they gave me all that was happening around this recording. The most important thing [they explained] is why the ambulance was eight minutes away from Hind, and they couldn’t send it. Because when you are living in the normal world, like here in the United States, you immediately send an ambulance if a child is asking for help. For me, it was very important to understand the process of why they couldn’t send an ambulance. When they told me why, for me, it was terrible. It gives them this moral dilemma where they lose whatever they do. This is the definition of tragedy.
At what point did you conceive of that moment, superimposing the reality over the recreation? In many ways, it feels like a distillation of your process.
For me, it was very important to say this really happened. I was lucky enough to have this archive of the real characters living that moment because they heard the bombing, but they were in denial. They couldn’t understand or even imagine that their colleagues, whom they sent to save this little girl, were bombed. For me, this was when the unthinkable happened. This is reality, and then for all the rest of the movie, we are more in an archival style with images that we actually saw on our social media feeds. The horrible thing about social media, it’s about amnesia, actually. It was very important to go back to those images to understand why.
Many people have experienced the events in Gaza through social media, a text- and image-based medium that is often consumed silently. Was there some element of wanting “The Voice of Hind Rajab” to counter the social media experience by adding dimension through sound?
In social media and breaking news, we have so much information. You see a dead body between [footage of] your football team winning and the best singer. It’s a lot of information for the human brain, and it makes us insensitive in a way. When it comes to cinema, and art in general, you can take the time to live in the truth of those heroes who wanted to save Hind. You take the time to experience the otherness, to feel empathy, to understand what really happened. For me, cinema is more space for remembrance and memory in a world where we are drowning in information and contradictory images.
The Brecht-style alienation effect from the theater was something you leaned on in “Four Daughters.” Was that philosophy of drawing attention to the artifice of your artistic construction still useful here?
My first movie was a mockumentary, actually, and I did my thesis when I was a student about the frontier between documentary and fiction. I’ve been carrying this reflection on how to depict reality through all my movies. Reality is so chaotic, and reality sometimes has no meaning. How do you depict reality using all the tools that cinema can give you? For Hind Rajab’s story, it’s factual. It’s not disputable. Even sometimes when you bring proof, you have people not believing you in this very polarized discussion. It’s not rational. This is also one of the reasons I didn’t do the classical documentary. At some point, you are done explaining. Cinema can give you empathy. Let’s experience together how the Red Crescent people tried to save this little girl, but they couldn’t. They paid the price of the life of their colleague in this attempt to save a young girl.
You’ve named some audio-centric films like “Blow Out,” “The Conversation,” and “The Guilty” as inspirations for the film. What did you learn from those films that you applied here?
What I love in cinema is when sound and image add to each other, not have the same function. And here, many people ask me, “You did a one-set movie in a closed space?” I said, “No, there are two spaces. There is the sound depicting the other space in Gaza in the car with this girl.” I believe in the power of the tools of cinema to tell an important story, and this story was very, very important to tell.
You share a producer, James Wilson, with “The Zone of Interest.” Your description made me think a lot about that film and how sound is used to illuminate what we don’t see. Do you see a similarity between those films?
Yes! I saw “The Zone of Interest” in Cannes because we were in the competition together with “Four Daughters.” For me, it was such a wonderful, strong movie. At the time, I wasn’t even thinking about doing “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” When [James Wilson and I] met on this project, it was we talked a lot about what we show, what we hear, and what we feel. Actually, I’m going to London next week, and Jonathan Glazer will host our screening.
There are always people who view aesthetic tools as either insufficient or inappropriate as a response to atrocity. While you clearly don’t share that point of view, do you think through some of these pitfalls for a project like “The Voice of Hind Rajab” and try to pre-empt those criticisms in production?
First of all, I think they are right. Movies are not enough to talk about the genocide, because what is enough is justice. Accountability is another level. But me, I only know how to do movies. Talking about the pitfalls, first of all, I did this movie because we live in this unjust world without any accountability. My ambition is that this movie can contribute to this desire for justice and accountability. Then, let’s talk about the pitfalls. For example, it was inconceivable to do the mise-en-scène of Hind’s killing. That’s why I made the aesthetic choice. I think it’s wrong. I made the choice to tell this story from [the perspective of] those who listen, because they are in the same position as us all around the world. For me, it was the best distance to tell the horror without having all those pitfalls. This was, for me, the right angle to tell this story. I couldn’t not tell this story because not telling this story or not saying anything is becoming complicit in a way.
How much do you think about the audience — their comfort, their response — when you make a film like “The Voice of Hind Rajab?”
It’s paramount. I’m doing movies for the audience. During the editing, we show the movie a lot and have feedback. Arabic-speaking movies can be seen as niche, but with this movie, it was very important for me to touch audiences all over the world. From Venice until now, I stopped counting audience awards. Almost every festival where there is an audience award, we got an audience award.
Last year, I spoke with Mystyslav Chernov, who won the Oscar for “20 Days in Mariupol.” He told me he couldn’t use any artificial sound in the film because Russia would then call it fake news. From your perspective, were any considerations made regarding how the film might be used as a tool by those opposed to recognizing the humanity of the Palestinian cause?
Sure, I thought about this. But I based all my work and research on the real people telling me what happened. But also, you have a very good job done by a forensic architect who did an investigation about the sound, the kind of bullet, and from which kind of tank in the Israeli army. They conducted all the investigative work, and it was also cited and reported by The Washington Post, which published a great piece on the event. Then, you have a documentary done by Al-Jazeera that takes all those elements.
As I mentioned, this story is factual. It’s not disputable, and these men have no answer except saying we weren’t there … which is not true, obviously. For me, doing the movie wasn’t about explaining. It wasn’t about providing proof, because we have moved beyond this. I’m coming from the documentary [world], and I know that the sound in documentaries in general is not good. With the tools of post-production, we can clean and make it almost perfect. For this recording, it was out of question to clean it and make Hind’s voice separate. We took it as raw as it was, and we used it like this in the movie.
The film was made to respond to a crisis as it was unfolding. There are questions about whether this fragile current peace will hold, obviously, but what do you hope “The Voice of Hind Rajab” will hold for a world beyond this stage of the conflict?
I hope that this movie helps in justice and accountability. Without justice and accountability, there can be no peace. We shot the film in a short amount of time because we live in a world where if you have the biggest gun, you impose your rules. This is not a very beautiful perspective for our children or the future. Things need to change, and I hope this movie will participate in this change.
You’ve mentioned part of the impetus for making films like “Four Daughters” and “The Voice Of Hind Rajab” is to find meaning in these seemingly senseless acts of violence. Have you?
Yes, I think that we need art. We need to remember that what’s happening in Gaza is a bleeding wound. It will take us time to realize [the peace], and it’s not yet there. We need more movies, more research, and more work to understand and prevent something like this from happening again.
“The Voice of Hind Rajab” opens in select theaters beginning Wednesday, December 17.
New York-based freelance journalist whose writing appears regularly on Decider, Slant, Slashfilm, and The Playlist, covering film with a focus on cultural context.
