Among the films in competition, few aroused as much excitement at the Venice Film Festival as The Voice of Hind Rajab. From the moment it was announced, it was clear that Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania had decided to place cinema at the heart of contemporary horror: the genocide in Gaza. Her starting point is the true story of Hind, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who, trapped in a car under Israeli fire, managed to call the Red Crescent.
What is unbearable is not only the endless wait for help, but the fact that she remained for hours trapped among the corpses of her closest relatives, aware that her mother was waiting for her at home, unaware that she would never see her again. This detail turns the story into an appalling testimony of fear and suffering, where innocence faces alone the absolute horror of the atrocities of the Israeli state.
Saja Kilani in The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2025).
The actual recording of that call becomes the focus of the narrative a few minutes into the film. Ben Hania avoids direct depictions of violence, allowing sound, silence, and time to convey the unbearable weight of the situation. The terror is measured in the minutes that tick by, in the girl’s trembling breat,h and in the helplessness of those who try to reach her without success.
This directly involves the members of the Red Crescent, who become tragic figures witnessing the horror. Here, the stylistic choice is decisive: the camera zooms in on their faces with close-ups, capturing restrained tears, broken gazes, minimal gestures, but also frustration and unease. The camera movements are restrained, almost suffocating, reinforcing the feeling of helplessness. A visual work that amplifies the suffering of the rescuers, who listen to Hind’s voice, knowing that they may not be able to get the rescue ambulance there in time. Something that will be achieved with great difficulty, but will be terribly frustrated by the destruction of the rescue vehicle by the unapologetic attack of the Israeli artillery.
The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2025).
In this intersection between documentary and dramatisation, the Palestinian performers do not “act” in the conventional sense, but rather relive the memory of an event that is still open, with moments in which real images of the rescue attempt are intercut with fictional ones on a mobile phone. The boundary between representation and reality dissolves, and the viewer finds themselves in a space where cinema is also, at every moment, a ceremony of shared grief.
Motaz Mahlhes in The Voice of Hind Rajab (Kaouther Ben Hania, 2025).
Ben Hania had already explored the tensions between fiction and reality in previous films, but here he takes that quest to the extreme. With a formal austerity that dispenses with excess and opts for restraint, he transforms the screen into a place of political and ethical resistance. The Voice of Hind Rajab does not merely tell a story: it restores humanity to a lost voice and forces us to look squarely at what many media outlets in the so-called civilised West prefer not to show in newspapers and official news reports.
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