How the distress call of a Palestinian child was turned into an Oscar contender

When Kaouther Ben Hania first heard the voice of Hind Rajab, it was life-changing. In January 2024, trapped in a car in Gaza City and under fire from Israeli forces, the 5-year-old Palestinian girl put in a call to paramedics from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society.

Left utterly terrified, with her relatives all dead around her, tragically, Hind did not survive the onslaught. Later investigations discovered 355 bullet holes in the black Kia she was in.

The 70-minute audio of her distress call went viral, as Hind became a symbol for the thousands of children killed in the appalling conflict that escalated in Gaza after the terror attacks of October 7, 2023.

"The first time I heard her voice, it impacted me a lot," says Ben Hania. "There was a feeling of helplessness around what is happening in Gaza. And since she was asking for help, this feeling of helplessness was amplified. And I thought this is something that cinema can translate."

A Palestinian story "should be told by Palestinian actors"

The Tunisian director behind the Oscar-nominated titles The Man Who Sold His Skin and Four Daughters was prepping another film at the time, but she knew she had to switch focus. "There was the urgency to tell this story," she says.

Setting her other project aside, Ben Hania conceived of a radical idea: to build a film around the audio. All set in the Red Crescent call centre, the film casts actors as the volunteers there, reacting to Hind’s real cries for help as they scramble to save her.

Naturally, Ben Hania spoke to Hind’s mother early in the process. "I told myself, ‘You can’t do this movie if you don't have the approval of Hind's mother.’ It's her child. Losing a child is one of the hardest things, I think, for a parent. So if she didn’t want me to do it, I wouldn’t do it.”

As distressing as it was, Hind’s mother approved the idea. "She told me that she doesn't want her daughter to be forgotten... [and] she told me, ‘I want justice for my daughter. If this movie can help, do it, please.'"

Emboldened by the idea of integrating the real audio, Ben Hania dismissed the notion of casting an actress to play Hind. "For me, it was not honouring her memory, faking the voice. And which young child actress will go through [that]? It was a ‘bad taste’ thing to do,” she says.

She also cast Palestinian actors as the volunteers. “For me, it’s a Palestinian story and it should be told by Palestinian actors. What is happening in Gaza makes all of us, in a way, Palestinian.”

A brutal but compelling film to watch, it highlights what Ben Hania calls the “Kafkaesque machine of the Occupation”, as volunteer Omar (played by Motaz Malhees) desperately tries to send out a rescue team, only to be hamstrung by protocols. “It's designed on purpose. Who put the rules?” says Ben Hania.

“This is the meaning of occupation. You put rules, because you are the dominant and those rules are designed to make their life impossible. It made the life of Hind impossible. And even if you follow the rules... you get bombed.”

Ethical quandaries and divisive reactions

When the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival last September, the emotional response was overwhelming. Critics were in tears and the film received a 23-minute standing ovation, the longest in the festival’s history.

“I could feel the emotion,” Ben Hania recalls. “I was hearing the sobbing. So then when they started clapping, it went forever, and it was like, ‘Will they stop?’” It was only that another movie was scheduled to play next that meant the audiences ceased the applause.

Despite this, the film has been met with a divisive reaction. “I know that my producers, and also their executive producer, received thousands and thousands and thousands of [spam] emails telling them that it’s not good to do this movie, it's antisemitic, it's not a story that they should tell,” explains Ben Hania.

Instead, the producers were told they should concentrate on the Israeli side of the story, that over 250 Israelis were kidnapped, and many more killed, in the brutal incursion by Hamas terrorists on October 7.

Some have also accused Ben Hania of manipulating the material. Trade paper Variety, in its review, said: “Some viewers will be fully immersed in the horror and despair of the moment, while others may have greater misgivings regarding Ben Hania’s layering of tearjerker tactics over material that hardly requires extra emotional amplification.”

Others have criticised the use of Hind’s audio, questioning the ethics of using such provocative footage for a movie.

How did such criticisms feel? “It's not easy to hear,” Ben Hania replies. “I did this film from a place of grief, actually. From a place of love also. And my main idea was to honour her voice, and to give her a voice, to amplify her voice, and to ask the audience to put themselves in the shoes of Palestinians and especially those working to save lives [with] humanitarian work.

“Our main purpose was to honour her memory and not to let her be forgotten. Through her, we can feel the pain of other lost children.”

In Venice, the jury – led by The Holdovers filmmaker Alexander Payne – awarded the film the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, second place behind Jim Jarmusch’s familial drama Father Mother Sister Brother. Rumours flew around that those on the jury were split.

“I've been in juries. I know how it works… I know that a jury is a small number of people,” Ben Hania shrugs, pointing out that the film later winning the Audience Award at the San Sebastián Film Festival, where it received the highest score ever from a public vote, was more meaningful to her.

From a struggle for distribution to Oscar contention and long-term impact

Since Venice, the film’s journey has been a bumpy one, initially struggling to find all-important US distribution, despite the acclaim. “Was I surprised? When you do the kind of movie I'm doing, everything is a struggle. I'm not a privileged filmmaker from a privileged background, doing movies set in a privileged culture that is mainstream. Like English-speaking movies are.

“So every movie is a struggle to be distributed, and Arabic-speaking movies with subtitles are perceived as niche. So you have this and you have the political context of this movie. So, no, I wasn't surprised.”

Fortunately, Ben Hania received help from several high-profile Hollywood names – including actors Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, who walked the red carpet in Venice in a show of support, Brad Pitt and filmmakers Jonathan Glazer and Alfonso Cuarón. They all came on board as executive producers to help raise awareness for the movie.

“It was something very coming from the heart, like we love this movie, we should support it,” says Ben Hania. “And it was beyond my expectation. I never, never thought that the movie would touch them this way. So it's huge.”

Already, the film competed in the race for Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes (where it lost out to Brazilian drama The Secret Agent) and is a major Oscar contender. Does she think it has a chance to be nominated or to even win?

“I have no idea. It's very strange. I hope so. I don't know. There are so many movies in this Oscar race. Great movies also. There is the Park Chan-wook movie [No Other Choice]. There is the Jafar Panahi movie, It Was Just An Accident. Sentimental Value. Colombia has Poeta. So many beautiful, beautiful movies.”

More importantly, can a film like The Voice of Hind Rajab be used as a tool to bring awareness to humanitarian disasters? Certainly, festival audiences who have watched the film have been left shell-shocked by what they’ve seen, with the audio of Hind leaving viewers numb in a way that nightly news reports simply can’t do. Perhaps it’s the case of putting a name and a face – or in this case a voice – to this appalling slaughter, rather than seeing deaths rack up like statistics.

“The narrative was Gazans are collateral damage, killed because they are collateral damage,” comments Ben Hania. “They are faceless. They don't have names. It's almost like they don't exist. And they are accused. All the victims are accused of being terrorists and Hamas. There is this kind of narrative that is infused everywhere. So I did this movie because of this. This little girl had a mother, she had a little brother... they were playing at the beach. They are human beings. They are not collateral damage or numbers.”

Ironically, the arrival of The Voice of Hind Rajab has coincided with the release of Israeli hostages, captured by Hamas in October 2023, as a ceasefire deal was struck. Ben Hania remains sceptical, however, about the future, with so many still suffering. The generational trauma is ingrained for years to come.

“The wound is still bleeding,” she says. “Can you undo what was done? How do you deal with this? Can we talk about change? Still things are very sensitive. I did the movie, but will it bring Hind to life? No.”

The Voice of Hind Rajab is in UK cinemas now.

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