On the afternoon of January 29, 2024, call handlers from humanitarian aid organisation the Palestine Red Crescent Society were connected with someone in urgent need of help. Over a crackling line through their headsets came the small, desperate, confused voice of a child—a five-year-old girl called Hind Rajab—pleading with someone to come and get her. She and six members of her family—her uncle, aunt, and four young cousins—had been driving through Gaza City, evacuating from the west to the north under a call from the IDF, when their car came under fire. All but Hind were killed. “They’re dead,” she cried down the line. “I’m so scared, please come.”
For the next three and a half hours, the Red Crescent’s Rana, and her colleagues, kept Hind on the phone as she hid inside the vehicle from nearby Israeli tanks, pressed up against the bodies of her four cousins, while the team frantically tried to secure and coordinate safe passage for an ambulance to rescue her. “Stay with me,” a terrified Hind said over and again. “Come get me.” To keep her on the phone, they asked her questions: what class was she in at school? (“Butterfly.”) They prayed with her. When Hind’s life began to fade, they tried to comfort her with breathing exercises until, eventually, as night fell, their prompts were met with silence from the other end of the line.
It took 12 days for Hind’s body—and those of her family—to be retrieved from the car; in the footwell lay a crumpled page from what appeared to be a coloring book. Just meters away from the bullet-ridden vehicle was the ambulance, now just a burnt-out shell. Having finally been dispatched, it had been attacked as it approached Hind’s vehicle. Inside were the remains of the two paramedics sent to save her.
Kaouther Ben Hania was in an airport, busy on the Oscar campaign trail for her last film, 2023’s Four Daughters (nominated in the best documentary feature film category), when she first heard the harrowing recording of Hind “begging for her life” on the internet, after the Red Crescent uploaded the audio to social media, immortalizing Hind’s voice as a haunting emblem of the war. So “immediate” were the pleas that came through Ben Hania’s own headphones that “for a millisecond” she thought Hind was speaking directly to her. “I thought she was asking me to save her,” recalls the 48-year-old Tunisian director today, from her apartment near Fontainebleau, a scenic town just outside Paris that’s famous for its forest. Her green surroundings “help me a lot to think,” she says, smiling, her dark eyes sparkling. “I moved here for this.”
For months, Ben Hania had been glued to news coverage of Gaza, her sense of helplessness and inaction at what was happening in Palestine increasingly growing into something that felt on the verge of “complicity.” As she promoted her film in Hollywood and readied herself to start a new project—an “ambitious” film she had spent years writing—she had been asking herself a question: what is the point and place of moviemaking in the face of such unimaginable atrocities?
“It was like the very voice of Gaza asking to be saved,” Ben Hania says of hearing Hind’s voice that day, and her subsequent decision to abandon her next project and instead turn all her energy into telling the story of the child’s final hours. She has done so to extraordinary effect in The Voice of Hind Rajab, which, in September 2025, won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, where it was greeted with a record-breaking, highly emotional 23-minute standing ovation, catapulting Ben Hania to being the most talked-about director of the year.
The film is easiest to categorize as a docudrama, though its inventive form, blending real-life audio with dramatized dialogue, doesn’t fit neatly into any one genre (this singular, hybrid approach of Ben Hania’s will be familiar to anyone who has watched Four Daughters). Actors were cast to play the real-life Red Crescent team, who interact with the original audio of Hind’s call. A mesmeric Saja Kilani plays Rana, Motaz Malhees is fellow call handler Omar, and Amer Hlehel plays ambulance coordinator Mahdi. At times, they speak verbatim the words of their Red Crescent counterparts; at others, they stop talking completely, and the screen cuts to simply show the zigzagging line of the phone recording. Otherwise, the action and dialogue are based upon the testimonies of those who were there in the Red Crescent HQ in Ramallah, a city approximately 50 miles away from Gaza, that afternoon.
Reconstruction, a word “cheapened by crime [documentaries],” is one Ben Hania tries to avoid using to describe her work. “What they [the Red Crescent] told me was their memory of that day,” she says. “They talked a lot about what they felt and their feelings. Cinema is the place for emotion, and it’s a great place for empathy. For me, it was important to be faithful to this. I don’t mind reconstruction, but I think this movie is beyond [that].”
Among the prizes and plaudits, there has, inevitably, been some criticism leveled at the film, namely whether or not it is appropriate, or ethical, to dramatize these events. “Yes, I’ve heard this,” Ben Hania says, unruffled. Her response? “I think that the movie is not comfortable to watch to start with because it’s showing us our human failure, the killing of a child.” For those that consider documentary to be “pure,” “It’s not,” she says. “When you do a documentary, you choose to show this rather than this; you edit. If you want a ‘pure’ reality, watch camera surveillance for 24 hours. When we talk about doing a documentary or a fiction or anything else, we are talking about a point of view. We are talking about choices.”
Documentary also means telling the story in the past tense. With actors, she could take the audience to “the moment when saving Hind was possible, and at the same time it wasn’t possible, by human design.” She is referring to the “armada of regulations” that surround being able to dispatch an ambulance in occupied territory. Even though the paramedics were just eight minutes away from Hind, the Red Crescent had to coordinate with the International Red Cross, who in turn speak to the Israeli military in order to greenlight safe passage for rescue. Watching the minutes tick by without word from the authorities, knowing the promise of rescue is not only feasible but so close, makes for some of the most stressful scenes of the film.
“Occupation designs a system to oppress you, and to make you crazy, and to make you hate your life, and to make you helpless,” says Ben Hania. “It’s designed in that way. If you don’t follow the rule, you are a terrorist. If you follow the rule, you are dead. It’s an impossible dilemma.”
Hind’s death made headlines around the world, but “I was astonished by the number of people who don’t know this story because [Hind] was under the rubble of other stories, other body numbers,” she says. At the time of writing, at least 60,000 Palestinians have been killed since the Gaza war broke out in 2023. Of those, approximately 18,000 are children. “Palestinian victims, especially in the West, are faceless,” she continues. “They are numbers. They don’t exist. There was something about resonating Hind’s voice in a cinematic form that can make you understand.”
Some have questioned whether now is the right moment to make this film, whether it’s too soon. It’s the only time in our interview Ben Hania’s steady composure wobbles. “All the people saying, ‘not now,’ I feel like it’s a kind of censorship. No, it should be said now. In 10 years, watch this movie and tell me if I was wrong to do it at this time.”
How to put into sufficient words the experience of watching The Voice of Hind Rajab, of listening to a five-year-old pleading to be saved, bewildered as to why no one is coming to get her, of knowing the horrific outcome for the child and those who tried to save her? Of hearing her mother, then 27-year-old Wesam Hamada, who didn’t get in the car that day, try to soothe her daughter over loudspeaker, knowing she couldn’t reach her. Ben Hania describes hearing the recording in its entirety for the first time as “very, very hard.” To “ensure authenticity” and a “genuine reaction,” the actors didn’t rehearse using the audio—the first time they heard it was when they started shooting. Ben Hania only ever intended to do one take. “They weren’t in a performance,” says Ben Hania of the intense emotion on screen. “They were in something that goes beyond acting.”
Now the battle Ben Hania faces is getting people to see it. Of course, she understands the desire people have to “protect themselves.” What she asks them to remember is: “It’s not your life. It’s OK. You have a comfortable life. We all have a comfortable life. But it’s important to know what is happening on the planet we are living on. If you can’t, it’s too difficult, do something about it.”
The other battle? Getting it out there in the first place. In spite of its accolades, the film struggled to land a US distributor—unheard of for a picture that was the recipient of a major award at a renowned film festival, especially with heavyweights such as Brad Pitt, Alfonso Cuarón, and Jonathan Glazer on board as executive producers. What does Ben Hania make of such industry reticence to buy her movie? “No comment,” she says with a half-smile, shaking her head. “I knew from the beginning when I started doing this movie that I’d be fighting, I’d be scrutinized more than any other filmmaker in the world.” The response it received in Venice was “something beyond my expectation,” she says, though others have argued that it should have won the festival’s top prize and questioned why it didn’t. But even if the industry is slow or scared to support it, it is true that the noise around it means that “nobody can ignore it.”
Ben Hania grew up in a small town in Tunisia, Sidi Bouzid, a relatively anonymous place until 2010, when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor, self-immolated and kick-started the Arab Spring. Then it became known “as the City of Revolution, of angry people,” she says, laughing at her town’s unlikely infamy. Nothing in her upbringing within her “humble family” suggested that filmmaking was the path she would follow. But Ben Hania always loved storytelling: “I was thinking about becoming a novelist because writing was something that I can do. I did business school in the capital, in Tunis, and I was very miserable. Then I discovered a kind of amateur cinema club. This changed my life. I was like, ‘I want to do this [professionally].’ It was very complicated to tell my parents I want to do cinema because for them it’s not a job, which is true. It’s not a normal job.”
She studied at the Sorbonne (her thesis was “about the frontier between documentary and fiction”) and lived in Paris until she realized that she was never there: “I’ve been based in my suitcase for I don’t know how many years. For me, being in Paris has no meaning, so I moved to have some peace of mind and be [in] the calm. I need solitude from time to time. I need silence. I need to be bored. I need to be disconnected. This gives me new ideas. I’m always in the process of thinking of a new project or finishing another one.”
How easy is it, I ask, to move on from a story like Hind’s? “When you talk about the real story, the story doesn’t end with the movie because you keep contact, and you are in the life of [these] people.” She often thinks about Hind because she is still in touch with her mother—they spoke just yesterday on the phone. “I’m in the life of the real Red Crescent employees. We’ll meet in a few days. It’s not like something that I did, then ‘Ciao, bye-bye.’”
I wonder if making this film has helped Ben Hania feel like she has done something, if it has assuaged those feelings of helplessness, of “complicity.” “There are two sides to this,” she says, sighing. “There are my feelings, and there is the reality. This movie will not bring this little girl to life. This movie will not stop the genocide. I often think about justice. My only hope, if this movie can participate in a small way, in an effective way to bring justice a little bit, maybe I can feel better. [Or] will we forget what happened? Will we go on our way? Didn’t we say never again after the Second World War? What does it mean, all this?”
The Voice of Hind Rajab is Tunisia’s submission for best international feature film at next year’s Oscars. At the time of writing, it remains to be seen whether it will be long-listed, let alone win (though its recent Golden Globe nomination in the best motion picture—non-English language category is an indication an Academy Award nod is on the horizon). But there is immense power in the thought of Ben Hania taking the podium on the night of the ceremony, having a platform to speak to the assembled luminaries and the world’s press. Not that she allows herself to think about a speech of any kind. What would she say to our leaders, to Prime Minister Starmer or President Trump, if she could? “I have nothing to say to them. They will hear me, and they will… it has no meaning. No, I think that everybody should operate where they can do something, but talking to [our] leaders—I’m not delusional about this.”
A few days before we meet, something incredible happens. In Gaza, among the rubble and dust and broken lives, people gathered around a makeshift red carpet and tent to participate in the inaugural Gaza International Festival for Women’s Cinema. The opening film? A smile breaks out on Ben Hania’s face. “It was a miracle.”
The Voice of Hind Rajab is in limited theaters from December 17, 2025.