The harrowing real-life audio of a five-year-old Palestinian girl's final pleas for help forms the devastating core of a new film that has stunned audiences and drawn support from Hollywood stars. The Voice of Hind Rajab recreates the tragedy of Hind Rajab, who was left to bleed out among her dead relatives after their car was attacked in Gaza.
A Voice That Stopped a Director in Her Tracks
Tunisian film-maker Kaouther Ben Hania first heard Hind's voice in February 2024 while scrolling through social media at Los Angeles airport. The child's desperate cries cut through the terminal noise. Hind had been dead for at least a week, but her recorded pleas, posted by the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), lived on.
The audio captured Hind's final hours after her family's car was targeted by an Israeli tank in Gaza City. According to the research group Forensic Architecture, the vehicle was later found with 335 bullet holes. Six of her relatives were killed alongside her.
"When I heard her voice, for that millisecond, it felt as if she was asking me to save her," Ben Hania recalls. "There was something very immediate in her voice, and it was very shocking." The director, then promoting her film Four Daughters in the US, immediately cleared her schedule to begin a new project centred on the recording.
From Three-Hour Recording to Cinematic Tribute
Ben Hania's research revealed the online clips were fragments of a three-hour emergency call recorded by the PRCS. The organisation sent her the full audio. Listening to it, knowing the inevitable outcome, was "one of the most difficult things I've heard in my life," she says.
Before starting, Ben Hania sought permission from Hind's grieving mother, Wissam Hamada, in Gaza. "I told her, 'I want to do a movie. Tell me if you don't want me to and I won't do it,'" the director explains. Hamada's response was clear: "I don't want my daughter to be forgotten. I want justice for my daughter. So if this movie can help, do it please."
The resulting film is a dramatic recreation set within the PRCS emergency call centre. Actors portray the four aid workers who fielded Hind's call, but the voice audiences hear is Hind's own. The actors respond to the real audio, mirroring the workers' futile attempts to console and reassure the dying girl.
Piercing Global Impassivity
Ben Hania feared the film, a subtitled Arabic story about an unbearable tragedy, might fade into obscurity. However, Hollywood figures including Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón, and Jonathan Glazer stepped in as executive producers.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2024, receiving a 23-minute standing ovation – the longest in the festival's history. For Ben Hania, this reaction signalled a momentary breach in the global numbness surrounding the conflict. UN estimates indicate more than 20,000 Palestinian children have been killed in two years of bombardment in Gaza.
"So many children have been killed that we are entering a zone of amnesia and insensitivity," Ben Hania states. "We're numb, but cinema, literature and art can change things... It is now about feeling what it is like to be in someone else's shoes. That is another level – and cinema can do this."
The Voice of Hind Rajab is released in UK cinemas on 16 January. It stands as a stark auditory monument to one child and a searing indictment of the violence that took her life.
