The docudrama about a Gaza tragedy leaving audiences ‘distraught’

At this year’s Venice Film Festival, no film has been more talked about than this latest project from Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, which recounts the heart-shattering story of a six-year-old girl killed in Gaza, and received a record 23-minute standing ovation at the festival this week.

It isn’t uncommon to hear cheers or boos at the end of a film festival screening, but when The Voice of Hind Rajab was shown to journalists and industry professionals at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, some far rarer sounds were heard. People were crying. Some of them were sobbing noisily, some were sniffling, some had red eyes, and almost everyone was too distraught to talk. The film is likely to prompt a similar response wherever it is shown. Later on in the day, at the festival premiere, it received what Deadline reported as a 23 minute-plus standing ovation, which it suggested may be a film festival record. It is now a hot favourite to pick up Venice’s top prize, The Golden Lion, on Saturday, and it is almost certain to be nominated for the Academy Award for best international feature film.

Kaouther Ben Hania, the Tunisian director of The Voice of Hind Rajab, is no stranger to the Oscars, having been nominated in the best international feature category for The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020), and in the best documentary category for 2024’s Four Daughters. But her latest work – which numbers Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Jonathan Glazer and Alfonso Cuarón among its executive producers – will have a greater impact than anything she has done before.

An innovative hybrid of drama and documentary, it recounts the heart-shattering story of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed in the Israel-Gaza war in January 2024. She was travelling one afternoon in a car in Gaza’s Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood with her aunt, uncle and cousins when the car was fired upon, and Hind was the only member of the family group to survive. She was then trapped for hours in the wreckage, squeezed against the bodies of her relatives, and hoping in vain to be rescued.

Clips of the phone conversations between the terrified girl and some Palestinian Red Crescent volunteers were circulated on social media. Now those same recordings have been used as the basis of Ben Hania’s film. Actors play the volunteers, based on the real people involved, in its main setting, the offices of a Red Crescent emergency centre, 52 miles away from Gaza. But, as a caption explains, Hind’s voice is the real thing. We are listening to actual phone calls made in January 2024. This means that the film has the atmosphere and structure of an immersive thriller about a feverish race against time. But the child’s voice on the crackling line turns it into something much more distressing. “Please come get me,” she pleads. “I’m scared.” And because we are hearing Hind’s voice, rather than that of an actress, we have the stomach-churning illusion that she can still be saved, even though we know that’s impossible.

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