'The Voice of Hind Rajab': A Voice That Refuses to Fade

"This film is not mine alone." Filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania returns to this idea again and again when she speaks about The Voice of Hind Rajab, centred on the final moments of a six-year-old Palestinian girl trapped inside a car under military fire.

For Ben Hania, it is a way of placing the film where she believes it belongs: With Hind’s mother, who chose to trust her, the Red Crescent workers who stayed on the phone and with the memory of a child whose last recorded moments now travel across cinemas and festivals instead of a broken emergency line. The film carries them all, moving with their weight and their dignity.

The Voice of Hind Rajab follows the frantic efforts of Palestinian Red Crescent volunteers responding to an emergency call from Hind Rajab. The recording of her real-life plea for help — captured moments before she was reportedly killed by the Israel Defense Forces — forms the crux of the film. The cast includes Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Amer Hlehel and Clara Khoury. The film is produced by Nadim Cheikhrouha, Odessa Rae and James Wilson.

Ben Hania first encountered Hind as most of the world did, through a fragment of audio of a small voice asking not to be left alone. What followed was not an intellectual decision to make a film but something physical, something that unsettled her sense of balance. “I felt an overwhelming wave of helplessness and sorrow. not intellectual, but physical. As if the world tilted slightly off its axis," the filmmaker says.

That feeling stayed and led her to the full recording, which was over seventy minutes long. The filmmaker says Hind's call felt like the "very voice of Gaza itself," calling for help into a void, met with indifference and silence. "It was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever listened to."

After that came the conversations. With Hind’s mother and the people who were on the other end of the call, trying to keep the child calm, trying to reach her. From those voices, the film slowly took shape not as reconstruction, but as something closer to transmission.

Ben Hania's cinema has always moved between forms, but here the question of fiction and documentary becomes an ethical one. She calls the film a dramatised work, written, staged, and performed, yet its centre is a real voice.

“I didn’t feel I was inventing anything. I felt I was receiving something (something urgent, something sacred) and my role was to shape a cinematic space capable of holding that voice with dignity. So I wouldn’t say this film “blurs” the lines between genres. I would say it intensifies them, it stretches the limits of what dramatisation can contain and what documentary can protect. All of these were ways of resisting narrative conventions and trying to get closer to a different kind of truth: not just what happened, but what it felt like, what it meant."

When she began meeting Rana, Omar, Nisreen and Mahdi from the Red Crescent, she realised something that changed the way she approached the script. None of them had gone back to listen to their own recorded voices. What they offered her instead was not a transcript of what had been said, but an account of what it had felt like to live through those minutes, navigating fear, confusion and the pressure of trying to save a child while knowing the limits closing in around them.

That difference shaped the film. The document and the lived experience remain distinct, but cinema allows them to exist together. So, if the structure of the film comes from that duality, its emotional force comes from the way it was performed.

On set, the actors were not working from an approximation. They were repeating, almost word for word, what their real-life counterparts had once said. In their earpieces was Hind’s actual voice.

“Yes, what you’re sensing is real. The actors weren’t just performing scripted lines. They were re-inhabiting a lived moment. During the shoot, each actor was repeating, almost word for word, what their real-life counterpart had once said to Hind. And in their earpieces, they were hearing Hind’s actual voice, taken from the original recording. All of the actors are Palestinian (as were most of the extras) and this film meant a great deal to them. They were not just interpreting a story; they were carrying something that," she says.

Before any of this could begin, there was a single condition she set for herself. Hind’s mother had to agree. Without that, there would be no film. "If Hind’s mother said no, I would walk away," the filmmaker says.

The contact came through Rana from the Red Crescent, who had been on the phone with Hind for hours that day and had since formed a bond with her mother. The two women had made a promise to visit Hind’s grave together when the horror ends. For Ben Hania, that promise contained the measure of trust surrounding the story.

"This film is not mine alone. It carries the weight of Hind’s mother's trust, the memory of a child whose voice the world cannot afford to ignore, and the courage of those who tried to reach her: the Red Crescent team who stayed on the line, the medic, and the ambulance driver who were killed in the attempt. It holds the grace of those who have lost everything, yet still found the strength and generosity to open their hearts and share with me their mourning, their dignity, and their unwavering humanity," she concludes.