The upcoming release of The Voice of Hind Rajab coincides closely with the second anniversary of the death of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed during the war in Gaza. In January 2024, Hind was travelling with members of her family when the car they were in came under fire. She survived the initial attack and remained trapped inside the vehicle for hours, surrounded by the corpses of her relatives, while attempting to reach emergency services by phone.
Audio recordings of Hind’s calls to the Palestinian Red Crescent and to her mother were later made public and circulated internationally, prompting widespread attention and condemnation. Two paramedics dispatched to reach the vehicle were also killed when their ambulance was struck before reaching the scene.
According to Gaza’s Ministry of Health, tens of thousands of Palestinians have been killed or injured since the conflict escalated in October 2023, with children accounting for a significant proportion of the casualties. UNICEF has repeatedly warned about the war’s impact on children. In a statement released in October, Executive Director Catherine Russell said that “64,000 children have reportedly been killed or maimed across the Gaza Strip, including at least 1,000 babies.”
The Voice of Hind Rajab is directed by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, whose previous work includes Four Daughters, The Beauty and the Dogs, and The Man Who Sold His Skin, the first Tunisian film to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film. The film is produced by Odessa Rae, Nadim Cheikhrouha and James Wilson, with executive producers including Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón, Brad Pitt and Jonathan Glazer.
Ben Hania is known for blending documentary and fiction, exploring real events through carefully constructed narratives. In The Voice of Hind Rajab, she combines original audio recordings with performed scenes, focusing on the emergency responders involved in the attempt to rescue Hind and the circumstances surrounding their mission.
In an interview with Vogue, Ben Hania said she set aside a long-term project after hearing the recordings of Hind’s calls, explaining that the scale of ongoing violence led her to question the purpose of filmmaking at that moment. She described deciding instead to focus on what could be done within her own field, ultimately choosing to tell Hind’s story with the permission of her mother, Wissam Rajab.
Speaking separately to Letterboxd, the director said the film was intended to honour Hind’s voice and to use cinema’s capacity for empathy to place audiences alongside emergency responders and others whose work centres on saving lives.
The film has already received international recognition, including a nomination for Best International Feature Film at Golden Globe Awards and being shortlisted in the same category at the Academy Awards. It also won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, where it premiered earlier this year.
Beyond awards recognition, The Voice of Hind Rajab contributes to ongoing discussions around the role of cinema in documenting contemporary conflict and preserving memory beyond daily news coverage. As Ben Hania has stated, the film aims to reflect the capacity of independent cinema to connect audiences with realities that may otherwise remain distant.
The Voice of Hind Rajab is scheduled for release in UK and Irish cinemas on 16 January 2026
