Blistering, soul-destroying and righteous in its sorrowful outrage, The Voice of Hind Rajab, screening at the BFI London Film Festival, honours its titular child and serves as a crowning example of what cinema can achieve.
When the end credits rolled in my press screening for Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, you could have heard a pin drop. Usually, critics, even seasoned ones, will get up and leave quickly, eager to start their reviews. Others may applaud if they feel inclined. In this screening, everyone around me and I sat in paralysed silence, taking in the full weight of what we had watched. Movies like this do not exist to entertain. They exist to inform, and this film does, filled with the empathy, urgency and righteous fury that the moment warrants.
January 29 2024: three months into the Israel-Hamas War. Responding to the horrific October 7 attacks, Israel has occupied the Palestinian Gaza Strip and its capital, Gaza City. The Israeli military kills men, women and children indiscriminately, under the guise of rooting out the terror cell Hamas. Fifty miles away, the Red Crescent charity has set up emergency lines, allowing distress calls from Gaza to reach volunteer workers so that they may coordinate rescue efforts, but only after jumping through superficial hoops that the Israeli military can overrule.
On this day, volunteer worker Omar (Motaz Malhees) received a phone call from a six-year-old girl, Hind Rajab. When attempting to evacuate Gaza City with her aunt, uncle and cousins, the car Hind was driving in was struck by an Israeli shell, killing her family and leaving Hind alone, trapped inside the vehicle. She calls the Red Crescent and Omar, alongside supervisor Rana (Saja Kilani), psychologist and fellow volunteer Nisreen (Clara Khoury), and Madhi (Amer Hlehel), the man tasked with securing the green light, to get a nearby ambulance for her, despite the destruction of the city all around her.
Hania is a Tunisian filmmaker with experience in both fact and fiction, most recently with her documentary Four Daughters. With The Voice of Hind Rajab, Hania hybridises the two media for a singularly ominous purpose. Where the film is essentially a dramatisation of the volunteer workers’ exhaustive efforts, the audio of Hind’s phone call is genuine. We are literally hearing Hind Rajab’s voice as she pleads for help, trapped and alone. Around the midpoint of the press screening, when Hind said the now-infamous words “I’m so scared, please come”, there wasn’t a dry eye from anyone in the room, myself included.
In another film, this could’ve been exploitative. However, under Hania’s direction, it sells the urgency of the themes – using recreation to sell the truth of what happened. To this day, Israel denies responsibility for what happened to Hind Rajab. Using Hind’s genuine voice, including the distinct gunfire in the background of some clips, the truth is laid bare in all of its unbroken horror. So committed is this docudrama to authenticity that, in one especially harrowing scene, we watch as Rana records Nisreen’s attempts to keep Hind talking on the phone, Rana’s mobile in the foreground. Behind it are the actors, but on the mobile screen is the genuine footage that the real Rana recorded. Like with the audio, it exists not merely to highlight the faithfulness of the recreation, but to emphasise the mortifying, rage-inducing truth that this actually happened. That Hind’s story is but one of countless that have occurred to innocent Palestinians ever since the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel in 1948, should give you pause for thought.
Hania and the team’s relentless filmmaking matches the tenacious efforts of the volunteers, keeping us squarely in the room as they scramble to get the necessary clearances – clearances that wouldn’t be needed in any other country. Tracking shots follow the characters as their initial calm gives way to outbursts of frustration. Close-ups captured with a handheld cam create the impression that the camera is a tragic onlooker. There is nowhere for us to hide and no pause button to press. That Hind herself is represented by the waves of audio bursts in the call logs leaves us with only our imaginations to visualise the details. Only in the climax do photographic stills reveal the terror of what she must have gone through.
Even those already familiar with the story may not know just how difficult it was to reach Hind. Like 2024’s equally bleak No Other Land, the film broadly shows how rigged the system is against Palestine, as the volunteers’ already overly complicated efforts to rescue Hind are muddied not just by Israel’s violent levelling of Gaza, but by the thick layers of pointless red tape. What should’ve been a simple eight-minute rescue is instead dragged out for hours, the longevity of the timeline made devastatingly raw as Hind slowly starts to give up hope, crucially captured when it clicks with her that her surrounding family members in the car are not asleep but are, in fact, dead.
Like Claude Lanzmann’s nine-hour documentary Shoah, the point of The Voice of Hind Rajab is not to entertain but to force us to bear witness. It tells its story excellently through vehemently realised craftsmanship, but, more importantly, the film scrutinises the colonialism that allowed this tragedy to happen at all. Hind Rajab was the victim of genocide, and although the volunteers’ efforts were nothing short of heroic, as depicted through the objective direction and striking performances from the cast, the film showcases the cruelty of apartheid and dehumanisation that the people of Palestine have been subjected to, as a consequence of Israeli occupation. Israel claims that Gaza’s destruction was necessary to destroy Hamas, but what sane person can look you in the eye and proclaim that this six-year-old girl was somehow in cahoots with Hamas? Hanis is demanding not only our acute attention and empathy but also our anger.
If The Voice of Hind Rajab is not 2025’s best film, then it is undoubtedly 2025’s most important film. That it lost the Golden Lion award at Venice Film Festival to the pretentiously boring Father Mother Sister Brother is possibly a reflection of what’s to come this awards season. Still, awards are not the point of this picture. It documents a microcosm of history through one heartbreaking true event; a cautionary warning that more stories like this will continue to happen unless the Israeli occupation ends, a genuine, working ceasefire is agreed upon, and Palestinians are allowed to live in peace without fear of resettlement or murder. Blistering, soul-destroying and righteous in its sorrowful outrage, the film honours its titular child and serves as a crowning example of what cinema can achieve.
The Voice of Hind Rajab is screening at the BFI London Film Festival and is awaiting a UK-wide release date.
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