The Voice of Hind Rajab: The Cinema of Witness

I don’t know about you, but I love going to the movies completely unprepared.

No trailers, no reviews, no “you have to see it, it’s incredible.”

I want the film to surprise me, to shake me, to make me doubt my own emotions. I want that moment when you sit down, the lights go out, and you think: “Okay, take me wherever you want.”

Sometimes I stumble upon unknown directors, unfamiliar faces, names I could easily mistake for Wi-Fi passwords - and yet, there it is - that small thrill of curiosity.

Because discovering something new, to me, feels like finding a secret room inside a house you thought you knew by heart.

Sure, finding yourself again is beautiful.

But losing yourself… losing yourself in a film completely foreign to you is something greater.

It’s an act of trust.

And cinema, like life, is an act of trust full of contradictions: joy, pain, chaos, and that fragile thread that binds them all together.

With that awareness, on September 28th, I went to the cinema. A few hours before stepping into the theater, I had already cried.

Because what I was about to see was a film I didn’t know, but couldn’t ignore - one whose story I knew in outline.

Because Hind Rajab was never just a character: she was a person. A five-year-old girl born at the wrong time, in the wrong place on planet Earth.

There’s something disarming about realizing that destiny is a geographical fact.

Some are born in neighborhoods with more cafés than hospitals; others in places where tanks fire at windshields.

And we, sitting in our comfortable red seats, try to understand how all this can coexist in the same world.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, the Tunisian filmmaker previously nominated for an Oscar for The Man Who Sold His Skin.

Her touch is both delicate and surgical - as if she knows that telling the truth is an act of balance between pain and dignity.

The film retraces the last hours of Hind, a Palestinian girl trapped in a car after her family was struck during the bombings in Gaza on January 29, 2024.

Operators from the Palestinian Red Crescent managed to reach her: the call lasted for hours.

We hear Hind speaking, crying, pleading for help, praying.

Ben Hania chose not to recreate that voice, but to use the authentic audio from the recorded phone call.

The actors - including Saja Kilani, Clara Khoury, Motaz Malhees, and Amer Hlehel - hadn’t heard the full recording before shooting.

They listened to it through headphones during the scenes, allowing the real to seep into their expressions.

It’s a choice that transforms acting into something almost mediumistic: they are not performing - they are listening.

And we, in turn, listen with them.

We don’t see death, but we can hear it breathing between the pauses.

At the Venice Film Festival, the screening was followed by twenty-four minutes of applause.

Twenty-four. Minutes.

An eternity, even for Venice.

But no one could bring themselves to leave: it was as if everyone needed to stay there, still, sharing the same lump in their throat.

As if clapping was the only way to say, “We’re not deaf, Hind. We heard you.”

The film won the Grand Jury Prize and is already shortlisted as Best International Feature for the 2026 Oscars.

Behind the production are names like Brad Pitt, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón, Joaquin Phoenix, and Jonathan Glazer - artists who, in a way, have lent their voices to those who no longer have one.

Hind Rajab is dead.

In Gaza today, hundreds of thousands of children are suffering, dying, while the world looks away.

Their voices echo inside our consciences, and silence is no longer acceptable.

Cinema has shown us a cruel reality, and ignoring that suffering is complicity.

If we remain still, if we choose not to hear, we become part of the tragedy.

And every day, every choice, reminds us that humanity is not a luxury: it’s a responsibility.

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Bianca curates and writes for The Olive Press, a space for reflections on cinema, culture, and landscape born within Il Giardino di Cristina.

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