Dr. Toyeba Mushtaq
“What begins as an eight-minute rescue stretches into a three-hour ordeal, revealing how protocol, permissions, and paperwork operate as instruments of violence. Time itself becomes a weapon, administered through delay and radio silence.”
The Voice of Hind Rajab is a searing cinematic study of helplessness, innocence, fear, and institutional paralysis. Set in Gaza, the film reconstructs the failed rescue of Hind Rajab, a six year old child trapped in a car under sustained Israeli military fire. Through an austere combination of original emergency call recordings and carefully restrained dramatization, the film refuses spectacle and instead commits itself to an ethics of listening and duration.
Director Kouther Ben Hania opens the film with archival voices and documentary fragments before gradually transitioning into performed scenes. This shift is deliberate and methodical. The archival material anchors the film in historical fact, while the dramatized sequences allow the viewer to inhabit the emotional and temporal weight of the unfolding event. Rather than diluting reality, the performative elements intensify it, extending the affective reach of the original recordings.
Shot largely as a single location drama, Voice of Hind Rajab is profoundly unsettling in its spatial and narrative restraint. The film moves between the call centre of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, the immobilised car, and the unseen military perimeter that dictates every decision. The narrative oscillates between protocol, negotiation, urgency, and moral paralysis, revealing how bureaucratic procedures operate as instruments of violence under occupation. What begins as a routine rescue, initially estimated to take no more than eight minutes, stretches into an ordeal lasting nearly three hours. Because paramedics had been killed in the area days earlier, the Red Crescent is forced to navigate a complex network of military and governmental permissions before a rescue attempt can proceed. Roads must be declared safe, routes approved, and movements authorised. Each delay compounds the danger. Time becomes a weapon, administered through paperwork and radio silence. Throughout this process, Hind remains on the phone with Motaz Malhees as Omar, frightened and alone, surrounded by the bodies of her murdered relatives. Dispatchers attempt to calm her using gentle language and improvised metaphors. Saja Kilani as Rana Hassan tells her, “They are sleeping, let them sleep,” masking death in order to preserve the child’s composure. The call centre emerges as a site of collective exhaustion and grief. Central to the film’s emotional architecture are the voices of Rana and Omar, whose sustained presence on the phone becomes an act of care in the absence of physical rescue. Their role extends beyond procedural dispatch. Through measured speech, repetition, and prayer, they attempt to stabilise Hind’s fear, transforming language into a fragile form of protection. Rana’s insistence on calm and Omar’s steady guidance function as improvised lifelines, revealing how emotional labour becomes a substitute for institutional failure. Staff members, many of whom have not seen their families for months, struggle to maintain professionalism as frustration escalates into raised voices, then collapses into sobbing underscoring the unbearable burden placed on those asked to keep a child alive using nothing but words.
Ben Hania’s emphasis on voice is central to the film’s formal and ethical power. Gunshots punctuate the soundtrack. Hind repeatedly articulates a single plea: to be picked up. She describes hearing gunfire and seeing a tank positioned directly in front of the car. The sound of shots punctures the call, and she reports blood on her clothes. Dispatchers respond with urgent yet fragile instructions, urging her to hide beneath the seat and recite prayers with them, using language as a means of distraction while simultaneously negotiating for permission to send the ambulance. When Hind says, “I don’t want to die, please come and pick me up before I die,” the call centre is left suspended between hope and dread, clinging to the possibility that she has not yet been injured. The film refuses to cut away from these moments. Instead, it forces the viewer to remain present with her fear, making endurance a shared experience. When permission is finally granted, the ambulance is ordered to take a longer route designated as safe. Blocked by rubble from a bombed building, the crew is stopped once again and forced to wait for further authorisation. As the ambulance comes within metres of the car, gunfire intensifies. The call disconnects. Hind’s final words describe a tank advancing toward her vehicle. Moments later, a loud explosion is heard. The rescue vehicle is bombarded. What remains is debris, ash, and silence.
The audience enters the film with the knowledge that Hind Rajab was killed by Israeli military fire. Yet this foreknowledge does nothing to soften the impact. The film’s power lies in its refusal to allow inevitability to dull its cruelty. The ending is not cathartic. When the credits roll, there is no applause. The silence is complete. Strangers sit beside one another with moist eyes, consoling each other quietly as the lights come up.
Voice of Hind Rajab gains further depth when situated within Kouther Ben Hania’s wider body of work. Her earlier films, The Man Who Sold His Skin and Four Daughters, consistently interrogate the politics of representation, the ethics of spectatorship, and the commodification of suffering. The Man Who Sold His Skin critiques the transformation of refugee bodies into aesthetic objects, while Four Daughters collapses the boundaries between documentary and fiction to examine trauma, memory, and maternal grief. In Voice of Hind Rajab, these formal and ethical concerns converge with devastating clarity. The hybrid structure, the refusal of visual excess, and the centrality of voice signal a cinema of radical restraint.
The film has received extraordinary international recognition. Screenings at major film festivals were met with 23 minute standing ovation at The Venice Film Festival in 2025 (considered a world record for the festival) , reflecting a collective response to its moral urgency and formal precision. Its nomination for this year’s Academy Awards situates it within a broader global reckoning, one in which cinema increasingly functions as a site of political and ethical witness. The film has also received visible support from the international film community, including prominent Hollywood figures such as Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón, Jonathan Glazer, Mahershala Ali, Lena Dunham, Bassem Youssef, and Mark Ruffalo, and other filmmakers who have publicly backed the project as producers and advocates. This convergence of global cinematic support underscores the film’s significance not only as an artistic work, but as an act of collective responsibility. Ultimately, Voice of Hind Rajab does not seek empathy. It demands accountability. It exposes how innocence is destroyed not only by weapons, but by systems of permission, delay, and administrative control. In doing so, the film reasserts cinema’s capacity to bear witness, insisting that listening, staying, and remembering are themselves political acts.
The film is currently screening in cinemas. It deserves to be watched, not as passive consumption, but as an act of remembrance.
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