The Voice of Hind Rajab made an immediate impact when it premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2025, receiving a 23-minute standing ovation and seven awards. More were to follow as it played at festivals around the world.
It’s a mixture of documentary and drama that tells the story of a Palestinian girl trapped in a car during the conflict with Israel. Its writer and director, Kaouther Ben Hania, is from Tunisia. Nominated for a 2026 Oscar in the Best International Feature Film category, this is her third shortlisting at the awards.
So, what makes The Voice of Hind Rajab so powerful? We asked a leading scholar of north African film and film-makers, Florence Martin, to tell us about the film and its director.
How did you feel when you left the cinema the first time you saw the film?
I left the cinema shattered, with a weighty feeling of utter powerlessness that rendered me voiceless. A fellow viewer asked to speak with me, and I gestured no. I could not.
I was haunted by the voice of Hind, or Hanood as her mother called her, a disembodied voice that is at the centre of the story, the scared voice of a frightened six-year-old little girl trapped in a car, for whom nothing could be done.
I had been the belated witness of the long hours of the Red Crescent workers to try and save her, and although all the viewers knew how it would end, the punch of powerlessness we felt was a jolt.
What’s the story about?
On 29 January 2024, the Red Crescent relief volunteers in Ramallah receive an emergency phone-call asking them to rescue a little girl, Hind Rajab, who is trapped in a car in Gaza. The car has been under fire and all other passengers (members of her family) are dead. The volunteers keep her on the line for hours as they are desperately trying to send an ambulance her way.
The story also gives viewers insights on the absurd conditions that prevail in the siege of Gaza by Israel. For instance, the Red Crescent call centre for Gaza is actually over 80km away in Ramallah, in the West Bank, since all phone lines in Gaza were destroyed in a bombardment.
In order to send an ambulance to Gaza, the volunteers have to get the itinerary of the ambulance approved by the Israeli army, and only the Jordanian government is trained to negotiate with the Israeli army for such an approval. As you may well imagine, tragic and Kafkaesque bureaucratic miscommunications and delays ensue.
What makes it so powerful?
Interestingly enough, what makes it powerful is not necessarily the reconstitution of an episode of a war in progress, but rather the filming of the reenactment of the volunteers’ conversations with Hind and of their feelings throughout her ordeal.
At first, the viewer may be turned off by a film in an enclosed space for 90 minutes, but the Red Crescent space mirrors the claustrophobic place from which Hind speaks.
It is not a straight documentary – none of Ben Hania’s are – but rather a docufiction, a documentary in which she asked actors to play the roles of the volunteers in the Ramallah centre.
The