REVIEW: The Voice of Hind Rajab: A film by Kaouther Ben Hania

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania

Platform: London Palestine Film Festival

Rating out of 5:★★★★★

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went to watch The Voice of Hind Rajab on the opening night of the London Palestine Film Festival. Part of that was because I knew Hind’s tragic story so well, and, like many people, I had heard clips of the desperate voice of a frightened little girl, on my social media many times over the last year or so. However, my own familiarity hadn’t prepared me for the emotional intensity of Ben Hania’s docudrama.

From its opening moments, the film pulls you into an atmosphere of relentless urgency. Ben Hania centres us in the Palestine Red Crescent emergency co-ordination centre in Ramallah, 52 miles away from Gaza, where responders are trying to rescue a six-year-old girl trapped in a car next to the murdered, dead, bleeding bodies of her family members. The ambulance is just eight minutes away from her location in northern Gaza, yet Mahdi, the coordinator, refuses to send it. His colleagues challenge him, plead with him, and even shout at him in anger. Sitting in the audience, I felt those emotions too: the confusion and the instinctive outrage.

Whether deliberate or not, these early scenes allow us to inhabit that same emotional gridlock that the volunteers themselves were trapped in. For long stretches, you are left to sit in the rising frustration of not understanding why he didn’t just send the ambulance. It’s only later that the truth slowly, painfully, clicks into place that without a confirmed safe route (a Green Light) obtained via a lengthy and complex chain of facilitators and organisations between the Red Crescent and Israel’s Ministry of Defence, any ambulance that attends risks being targeted and those inside it, killed.

What makes the film painfully unbearable at times is Hind’s voice, no matter how much I had braced myself to hear it. Ben Hania uses Hind’s actual emergency calls from that day in January 2024, her voice confused, vulnerable, and begging for someone to come and save her, and holds it at the centre of the film. Hearing her say she is scared, that it’s getting dark, that she can hear the tanks getting closer, you want so desperately to pick her up and take her far away, somewhere safe, somewhere without bullets and tanks and soldiers.

Even though you know the outcome, the film tricks your heart into hoping that she might be saved. It is a cruel, impossible hope, but it draws you deeper into the hope that the responders perhaps had that day; that maybe her fate would allow this little girl to be saved.

The emotional velocity of the actors’ performances is startling; Omar (Motaz Malhees), desperately trying to convince Mahdi to send the ambulance, angry, frustrated, keeping a running score on how many minutes have passed since Hind’s call, and his supervisor, Rana (Saja Kilani), swallowing her tears as she keeps Hind talking, and is both strong and resolute and vulnerable and fragile at the same time. And finally, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), who must bear the crushing weight of responsibility in a system that requires permission before compassion. Where lives matter less than protocol. A protocol that relies on the cooperation of the very same army responsible for shooting at the car with Hind’s family inside.

As I watched, I wondered, how has the world become almost immune to the acute suffering that we see daily as we scroll through on social media? How have we become accustomed to seeing the dismembered limbs of children? Of skeletal bodies due to forced starvation? Of homes, schools, hospitals, and lives turned to rubble?

The emotional crescendo comes in the closing section when Ben Hania shifts from drama to documentary. Seeing Hind’s mother speak, the pain in her heart so visible on her face, seeing home footage of Hind playing on the beach; those scenes are the ones that make the audience’s tears come audibly, even sitting amongst strangers in the cinema. Suddenly, she is no longer a voice through a phone line. She is a child with a laugh, a face, a family, a life. And that is when the real pain of the loss finally settles over you, heavy and inescapable.

While the film follows the desperate efforts to save a child, it is hard to forget the political forces that create such systems of cruelty where a little girl is left to bleed out for hours, alone and frightened. It is not an easy watch, but it is necessary. At its heart is Hind’s voice, so tragically silenced that day, but which cannot be ignored, it cannot be erased, and it demands that we bear witness.

The London Palestine Film Festival runs until 28 November at the Barbican Centre, London. Full listings can be found here: https://www.palestinefilm.org.uk/

The Voice of Hind Rajab will be shown in UK cinemas from January 2026. Look out for listings near you.