The Voice of Hind Rajab should make viewers uncomfortable, says director Kaouther Ben Hania

Tunisian filmmaker speaks to The National about motivation behind award-winning docu-fiction

Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania shot the film over three weeks after receiving family permission to use real audio. EPA

Rarely do films make an impact as big as Kaouther Ben Hania’s new work, The Voice of Hind Rajab.

Unveiled on Wednesday at the Venice Film Festival, the film turned hardened critics to tears. The premiere, attended by actors Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, both of whom are among the Hollywood stars lending their names in support of the movie, was pure raw emotion. The audience gave a 24-minute standing ovation, a festival record.

On Saturday the film was awarded the festival's second prize, the Silver Lion.

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Set in a Red Crescent Emergency Centre in Palestine, The Voice of Hind Rajab recreates events around the harrowing distress call placed on January 29, 2024, by a five-year-old Palestinian girl, trapped in a stationary car as Israeli forces shell Gaza.

Alone and terrified, her uncle, aunt and four cousins all dead in the vehicle beside her, all she wants is to be rescued. Investigators later found 335 bullet holes in the car she had been sheltering in.

While Palestinian actors play the Red Crescent workers, the audio of Hind is real, a weaving of fiction and documentary, moments before her death.

When Tunisian director Ben Hania first discovered the audio, she was horrified.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is set in a Red Crescent Emergency Centre in Palestine. Photo: TIFF

“It was one of the most difficult things I’ve heard in my life,” she says, sitting in a Venetian villa and sporting a pin-badge on her black dress emblazoned with the word ‘enough’.

Despite working on another project at the time, she abandoned it, realising the urgency of getting Hind’s story out into the world. Shooting the film over three weeks in Tunisia last November, Ben Hania first went to Rajab’s mother to seek permission to use the audio.

“Hind’s mother told me something about the voice of her daughter: it should be heard, and not be forgotten,” she recalls. Her mother has yet to see the film – and may never do, given how triggering that would be – but other relatives have.

“They were very proud of the movie,” says Ben Hania. Some critics have questioned the ethics of using this girl’s plight for dramatic purposes, with trade paper Variety accusing Ben Hania of “tear-jerker tactics” to make her blunt point.

Ben Hania, whose last film, the Oscar-nominated Four Daughters, plays in a similar docu-fiction arena, makes no apologies for using Hind’s own voice, rather than that of an actress.

“The voice of this little girl can make people uncomfortable. I can totally understand it, and that’s why I’m doing this movie. I’m not doing this movie to make people comfortable because Gazans are not having a comfortable life.

“Hind’s mother … she’s mourning and she doesn’t have a comfortable life. So if people are thinking, ‘Ah, it’s not moral to do this’ … for me, I have the blessing of the mother. It’s important that Hind’s voice stays.”

The Voice of Hind Rajab is the latest film from two-time Oscar-nominated Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania. Photo: Mime Films / Tanit Films

Undeniably, Ben Hania’s use of the real audio puts a face, or a rather a voice, to the conflict in ways that desensitising news reportage simply can’t. “The narrative was Gazans are killed because they are collateral damage,” adds Ben Hania.

“They are faceless. They don’t have names. It’s almost like they don't exist. 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 are human beings. They are not collateral damage or numbers.”

Entirely set in the Red Crescent offices, the overwhelming feeling is one of helplessness, as volunteers field Hind’s call but, due to safety protocols, are unable to send a rescue vehicle immediately.

“They are confronted with the Kafkaesque machine of the occupation,” explains Ben Hania. “They have to follow crazy rules just to send an ambulance for a child. We live in countries where, when a child [is in peril], the ambulance is eight minutes away. It arrives directly. Of course, this is not the case in Gaza because of the occupation. But people don’t know this, they don’t know this reality.”

Inevitably, a film like this is divisive, especially the ticking clock aspect to the girl’s rescue. Fictional thrillers like the 2018 Danish film The Guilty (and its Hollywood remake with Jake Gyllenhaal) similarly used emergency call centre setting to increase tension.

But Ben Hania is defiant. “It’s reality in Gaza,” she says. “It’s a horror show. It’s beyond what we can imagine in fiction.”

The undeniably shocking finale depicts real footage of the bullet-riddled vehicle containing the bodies of Hind and her relatives. “You don’t see them the same way you see them if you are scrolling on your phone,” Ben Hania says. “You see them with all the charge of the movie.”

According to Ben Hania, there are groups attempting to destabilise the project. “I know that my producers, and also their executive producer, received thousands and thousands and thousands of emails telling them that it’s not good to do this movie, it’s anti-Semitic,” she says. “It’s like a spam but sent from different emails. So you can’t stop it … it’s something co-ordinated.”

The Cannes Film Festival rejected the movie earlier in the year, but Ben Hania has had a wealth of support from Hollywood.

Phoenix and Mara are executive producers, alongside filmmakers Jonathan Glazer and Alfonso Cuaron. Also lending support are Brad Pitt, and his partners at his production company Plan B Entertainment, Dede Gardner and Jeremy Kleiner. They all came on board after the film was finished.

Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara with Kaouther Ben Hania, actor Motaz Malhees and actress Clara Khoury hold a portrait Hind Rajab on the Venice Film Festival red carpet for The Voice of Hind Rajab. AFP

“We showed them the movie and they were really touched by it and wanted to support it,” Ben Hania recalls. “So it was something coming from the heart and beyond my expectations. It was huge.”

Phoenix and Mara have been vocal about the situation in Gaza, while Glazer used his Oscar acceptance speech for The Zone of Interest to condemn the dehumanisation of the conflict.

Curiously, the film is akin to Glazer’s Holocaust drama, which never showed the atrocities taking place inside the Auschwitz concentration camp, instead using sound to convey the horrors.

“This is the richness of cinema,” Ben Hania says. “Cinema is image and sound. We are in the offices of the Red Crescent, but we are also in Gaza, with the sound.”

Likewise, she was determined to cast Palestinian actors. “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.”

Already, the film’s been selected as Tunisia’s official entry for the Oscars next year. Ben Hania previously made history when her 2020 feature The Man Who Sold His Skin was the first Tunisian film to be nominated for an Academy Award.

She welcomes any attention that an awards campaign can bring. “It needs to be seen,” she says. “It needs distribution. As a filmmaker, I want my movie to be seen.”