The Voice of Hind Rajab

January 29, 2024. Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call. A six-year-old girl is trapped in a car under Israeli fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. While trying to keep her on the line, they do everything they can to get an ambulance to her. Her name was Hind Rajab.

This is the film everybody has been talking about since its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival. A sure bet for the top award after it was applauded for 23 minutes by sobbing, shattered spectators (the longest standing ovation on record at a film festival), it came, somewhat absurdly, second. The film you think you’re not strong enough to face, but that you may well want to experience. Be with other people and cry and scream your rage and applaud this effort to amplify the silenced voices of children intentionally orphaned, starved, shot at, bombed.

Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania was already known to be audacious and two of her previous film experiments earned her Oscar® nominations. But The Voice of Hind Rajab is in a whole other category. Using the full recording of Hind’s call is a devastatingly uncompromising approach to telling the story. And it is also pertinent and consequential in how it is meeting History and answering our need to express heartbreak. And then do something about it.

Presented in association with Amnesty International.