‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ San Sebastian Review: A Child’s Plea from Gaza

In her previous film Four Daughters, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania explored innovative ways of blending fiction and documentary, inviting actresses to embody real people while mixing testimony with staged reenactment. With The Voice of Hind Rajab, she continues that exploration, this time splitting the equation more decisively between sound and image. The documentary element lies in the audio: the real, harrowing recordings of a six-year-old Palestinian girl trapped in a car in Gaza after a bombing, surrounded by her dead relatives, desperately calling for help. The visual element is fictionalized: dramatized scenes of the rescue workers at the Palestine Red Crescent center in the West Bank, portrayed by actors, who try to coordinate a rescue mission while listening to Hind’s fragile, terrified voice.

The structure is striking and, for the most part, it works. The device recalls Gustav Möller’s The Guilty (and its Hollywood remake with Jake Gyllenhaal), where the action unfolds almost entirely in an emergency call center, with the real drama taking place in unseen spaces conjured through voices, tones, and silences. Here too, the tension exists in parallel: the logistical, political, and bureaucratic struggles of the Red Crescent volunteers, and the imagined nightmare Hind is living through in that car, her voice the only evidence that she is still alive.

Ben Hania’s decision not to show what happens to Hind is crucial. To visualize the events with actors would risk turning horror into spectacle. It is enough—more than enough—to hear her voice: pleading, exhausted, sometimes silent. The sound carries a weight no image could ethically or aesthetically bear. At the same time, the dramatized side of the film retains a connection to reality: each actor represents an actual volunteer who was directly involved in the case, lending the fiction a documentary grounding.

The story itself took place on January 29, 2024. The Palestine Red Crescent in Ramallah received a call from Germany about relatives caught under fire while trying to flee northern Gaza. When they finally managed to establish contact, the only survivor was six-year-old Hind Rajab, alone in the car with her lifeless family members, while the gunfire continued. Hind begged them to come for her. From the outset it was clear this would be a near-impossible mission.

The film follows two threads: the painstaking efforts of the volunteers to organize a rescue—negotiating permissions, navigating military blockades, strategizing amid shifting circumstances—and the ongoing phone calls with Hind, where they attempt to comfort her, to keep her calm, to buy time. But every small step forward is met with new obstacles. The situation changes constantly, becoming more complex, more desperate, and more heartbreaking.

The result is a film that is both restrained and devastating. The Voice of Hind Rajab avoids sensationalism but does not soften the impact: the brutality of the situation emerges naturally from the voices and the impasses. The larger political context is implicit but inescapable. The story unfolds against the backdrop of the Israeli bombings of Gaza that began in late 2023, described as retaliation for Hamas’ October attacks. Ben Hania does not need heavy-handed political commentary—the reality speaks for itself. Life in Gaza, as the film makes painfully clear, is hemmed in by violence and impossibility. Hind’s tragedy is singular, but it echoes countless others that have unfolded daily for nearly two years.

What makes the film remarkable is how it uses form—sound as testimony, image as reconstruction—not only to convey the urgency of one child’s ordeal but also to raise broader questions about how cinema can bear witness. Ben Hania has built a career on experimenting with hybrid modes, and here she pushes the boundaries again, crafting a film that is both unbearably intimate and politically charged.