How Kaouther Ben Hania amplified the Palestinian voice

The most wrenching moment in The Voice of Hind Rajab comes late in the film. The Red Crescent despatchers have lost contact with the Palestinian girl they’ve been talking to. They assume she’s died, along with her four cousins, uncle and aunt, in a bullet-ridden car surrounded by Israeli forces. But then they hear her again. Permissions finally come through for an ambulance to approach. For the first time, they dream of a miraculous rescue. But we know this won’t happen.

Six-year-old Hind Rajab was killed on 29 January 2024, along with six family members and the two men in the ambulance that went to rescue her. The details of her death, and the recordings of her desperate pleas for help, drew global outrage. Forensic Architecture, a research group based at Goldsmiths, University of London, later concluded that 335 rounds had been fired at the car. The details of her death, and the recordings of her desperate pleas for help, drew global attention to the genocide in Gaza, which continued unabated till the ceasefire in October last year.

One of the many deeply affected was Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, who reached out to the girl’s mother to ask for permission to make a film about her killing. She shot it in Tunisia, with Palestinian actors playing the Red Crescent workers. The film premiered at the 2025 Venice International Film Festival, where it won the Grand Jury Prize. It has since been nominated for Best International Feature in the upcoming Oscars.

At this year’s Berlinale, where organisers and jury came in for strong criticism for their hands-off stance on Palestine, Ben Hania rejected the ‘Most Valuable Film’ prize at the Cinema for Peace gala. “Peace is not a perfume sprayed over violence so power can feel refined, and can feel comfortable,” she said then. With an India release for The Voice of Hind Rajab being negotiated, we spoke to Ben Hania about her concise, necessary film. Edited excerpts:

How did you arrive at the treatment that you have finally used—a dramatisation, not a documentary, with the real voice of Hind?

This movie, the desire or the urgency to do it, started when I heard the voice of Hind for the first time, on social media. I talked to Hind’s mother and she told me, please do the movie. The main idea was how to make the most impactful but also respectful movie, because this story affected me in a very deep way and I wanted to share what I felt with the audience.

I’m a documentary filmmaker, and I’ve also done fiction, so I know the strength and the limit of both forms. This story is about an event in the past, so (in a documentary) you would be explaining what happened. But I needed to have something in the present tense. When they hear the voice for the first time, the girl is alive, she is asking for help.

There is also this aspect that when I was doing the movie, the genocide was ongoing. Every day you have the killing of different Hind Rajabs. So I wanted to do a movie in the present tense, with the impact and strength of dramatisation but also with the truth and the factual element of the voice. I know that the combination is risky. Because I did Four Daughters (a 2023 documentary that used dramatisations), I felt comfortable taking this risk.

Though both films recreate real events, in ‘Four Daughters’ you complicate and layer the truth, whereas in ‘Hind Rajab’ it’s the clearest possible presentation of the truth.

Four Daughters is different because it's about personal memories, which can be interpreted in different ways. In The Voice of Hind Rajab—this is a war crime, which was investigated by Forensic Architecture, by the Washington Post. And you have at the heart of this film a true document: the recording. So you don't have this kind of interpretation of what happened. There is no personal memory, you have the archive already.

The rest of what happened, between the employees, this, in a way, is why I did the dramatization, because it's from their testimony, what they remember from that day. But what the actors say to Hind is word by word what is in the recording.

Was it important for you to complete this film quickly and get it out for the world to see?

It was. We did it actually in a state of emergency. I was so angry about what happened to Hind, what was happening in Gaza. I couldn’t stay silent. I needed to do something. So there was this energy and I think that all the people who came along on the journey had this same energy of indignation.

We needed the movie to be released and shown. There are a lot of people who told me, it’s a movie to do in 5, 10 years. But even today, you have Gazans filming their massacre on cellphones. I needed the movie to be part of this change.

Your decision to keep Hind’s voice as audio but not do a recreation of her visually—was that a moral or an aesthetic decision?

It was a moral decision. I can’t do a mise-en-scène of the killing of this child. But I wanted her voice to echo. So her voice, the real voice, is the central part and I wanted to do a movie to honour it. That’s why I decided to put my camera with those who listened.

When did the actors hear the full recording?

They didn’t hear Hind’s voice in rehearsal. I had them learn their lines as it’s said in the recording. The first time they heard her voice was in front of the camera, when we started shooting. But rehearsing and learning is different from speaking and having the voice of this little girl answering you on the phone. That’s why they weren’t acting, everything was real, because they were living this moment for the first time.

For the actors, having to hear that voice and be in that moment must have been a huge challenge.

Yes. The set was very emotional. I think this is the movie where I took the longest breaks, because we needed to hug each other, to speak. The actors are Palestinian but also the extras; though we shot in Tunisia, I needed the extras to be Palestinian. At the same time on the news this genocide is going on. I can say that it was emotional, but also the fact that we were shooting and doing this story gave all of us some meaning, and it was very important to finish the work.

Did you shoot a lot of takes?

No. In a normal fiction movie I’ll ask the actors to give me variations, to do several takes, to say it this way or that way. In this movie, it didn’t feel right to do this. I decided we’ll shoot it almost like a documentary, long takes, all the emotion, and then I’ll see in the editing.

At times in the film, you’ve used the real voices of the despatchers and in one scene there’s a video of them along with the dramatisation. Even though the viewer knows the film is based on real events, did you feel this needed to be reiterated?

I needed to have a clear contract with the audience because of two things. When you have actors, people always think it’s fiction, so I needed to tell them those are vessels for the real person. Also, I was afraid that this story can, in a way, look like an American thriller, a rescue mission movie. But it’s real, so I needed to tell the audience it’s not a thriller. In a thriller you never kill the girl at the end.

How did you go about recreating the interactions between the Red Crescent staff?

I spoke to them when I was writing, in the development process. They told me a lot of things; I only kept what was significant for this call. When I did the casting, I put the actors in contact with the person they’re portraying. They were really great partners from the beginning—I sent the script to them for feedback. So they were really close to the process.

You said in Berlin that cinema is not image-laundering. Has making this film revealed anything to you about the broader response to the genocide?

I mean, the response varies. In Western countries, France, Germany, it is complicated, in the US also. There is a desire by powerful people and by the mainstream media to silence the Palestinian voice. It’s very uncomfortable for them; you have all the European guilt concentrated in this place, so they don’t want to hear about it. But at the same time, you have a lot of people who want to hear the Palestinian perspective. So you have these strong contradictory desires, and we found ourselves having to navigate this.