When the world first stopped to hear the voice of Hind Rajab, the little girl from Gaza hiding from bullets in her family’s car, Kaouther Ben Hania was standing frozen in the airport. Now, she’s delivered a masterpiece that asks us to listen again. The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025), now nominated for Best International Feature at this year’s Oscars, is a brilliant piece of work at the height of the docufiction genre. It follows the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) emergency dispatchers as they get a tip from Hind Rajab’s overseas uncle, begging them to try and find out why her fleeing family won’t answer the phone. When they reach her, the incredible cast of first-time actors and veterans alike will try to comfort her, save her, and memorialize her while the real phone recordings of Hind Rajab play.
You can listen to our previous interview about Kaouther Ben Hania’s process of bringing the story to life here.
L-R: Motaz Malhees as Omar A. Alqam and Saja Kilani as Rana Hassan Faqih in THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB. Photo courtesy of Willa.
Docufiction is not a beloved genre or technique, which you can see by the good-but-not-great Letterboxd curve of The Voice of Hind Rajab at this moment when mostly critics and NYC/LA audiences have seen it. It is a genre that combines documentary elements: recordings (Reality (2025)), transcripts (The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928)), or scripted content with documentary interviews (The Unknown Country (2022)). “What’s the point?,” is often the response from general audiences when a filmmaker decides to handcuff their script to documented history. Why let reality dictate your words when reality might not be as good as “…the truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand” from All The President’s Men (1976)? Because reality is worse than our imagination. Imagination shapes memory as much as reality does. And we often ignore both of those truths.
“What’s the name of your school?”
”A happy childhood.”
History is shaped in the now as much as it is in the looking back, and cinematic docufiction allows us to freeze emotional memory of an event at 24 frames a second so that future historians, students, and cinephiles do not misunderstand our moments. One only has to look at the modern misreadings of Separate Tables (1958), a film about the persecution of queerfolk in 1958, to see the importance of this emotional preservation. That film uses heterosexual assault as a euphemism to get around censorship of LGBTQ+ stories under the Hayes Code, and, in doing so, context is lost on the historical viewer, as well as certain viewers in its time. The wave of Palestinian films since the genocide kicked into a new gear on October 8th (No Other Land (2024), Palestine 36 (2025), Happy Holidays (2025), and All That’s Left of You (2025)), is significant in its effort to memorialize moments from the past and the present as quickly as possible, ala The Battle of Algiers (1966). That swiftness is the magic of the camera, and few films in recent time employ it as well as Ben Hania’s does here.
Saja Kilani as Rana Hassan Faqih in THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB. Photo courtesy of Willa.
The film takes place almost entirely in the PRCS offices, a type of location not classically suited to visual dynamism. But Ben Hania and cinematographer Juan Sarmiento G. (A Poet; Islands) make an excellent choice to turn the panes of glass in the office — dividers, doors, mirrors, computers screens, and windows — into not only reflected planes of action, but into lenses for the viewer as well. One frame that haunts the mind upon exiting the theater is of Motaz Malhees’s (Speak No Evil; 200 Meters) Omar A. Alqam as the camera positioned from inside his computer takes the perspective through a waveform of Hind Rajab’s voice as top-down lighting casts the shadow of a skull on his face. Even from the relative safety of the West Bank in 2024, the reaper overwhelms his life and mind.
Amer Hlehel as Mahdl M. Aljamal in THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB. Photo courtesy of Willa.
Returning to the aforementioned process film of all process films, All the President’s Men is famous for dolly-zooms of the two reporters typing away at desks placed on opposite quadrants of the frame and room, working towards the same goal. Ben Hania finds a new spin on that type of shot here, positioning at only one desk from the other side of a hallway walled by glass. In the reflection of the closest pane, a second desk is reflected. Shot in deep-focus, Ben Hania racks between the desks not via focus, but by a change in light caused by an actor walking between the panes and down the hallway, affecting the reflections. This office of reflected death is in Ramallah in The West Bank, many miles from Gaza, with Israeli-occupied territory standing between these telephone operators and the girl they want to save. The ambulance team they are directing is just 8 minutes from Hind Rajab, but Israeli permission to save her is hours and hours away, leaving the PRCS staff with nothing to do but desperately wait and listen.
“Seriously? check out social media. Look at them. Take a good look. Children’s bodies ripped apart on the side of the road. Do you really think the voice of a terrified little girl will spark their empathy? She needs an ambulance. The rescue team!”
The lead of the film is ostensibly Malhees’s Omar. He and Saja Kilani’s (Chronicles from the Siege; Simsim) Rana Hassan Faqih work for Amer Hlegel’s (The Time That Remains; Paradise Now) Mahdl M. Aljamal and Clara Khoury’s (Body of Lies; Thank You for Banking with Us) Nisreen Jeries Qawas. They play the real staffers we saw on social media talking to Hind Rajab, and their performances are interwoven with documented elements, voice recordings, and performance art mixing on phone calls and cell phone cameras. They are an excellent ensemble. Malhees brings naturalism to a manic anger that could easily have strayed into absurdity. Kilani gives a masterclass in active listening. Khoury impeccably replicates the documented patient manner of the real Qawas while speaking with Rajab. Hlehel gives one of the best performances of the year as the coordinator who has to make the tough calls about which lives to risk to save this little girl.
THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB director Kaouther Ben Hania. Photo Credit: Ammar Abd Rabbo. Photo courtesy of Willa.
The most compelling scripted drama takes place in arguments between Omar and Mahdl, at odds about whether or not to wait for Israeli permission to send the ambulance. They embody a battle between a desire for dignity and a reckoning with helplessness, the thematic engine of the film. “If I was an Israeli soldier, I would do that,” argues Omar when they debate whether mercy is available to them. Mahdl shows him a wall of martyrs. Dead ambulance drivers. When the stress causes them to lash out and risk their friendship, they reconcile by playing a first-person shooter game on their phones, a surreal moment of human observation by Ben Hania.
L-R: Motaz Malhees as Omar A. Alqam, Saja Kilani as Rana Hassan Faqih, Clara Khoury as Nisreen Jeries Qawas in THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB. Photo courtesy of Willa.
Of course, we know the ending, even if some have already forgotten it. The Israeli forces shot and killed Hind Rajab long after they slowly advanced on her with tanks and made her hide among the bodies of her family members who they shot hours prior while in their car, and they killed the ambulance drivers nearing her location for rescue, as well. The film does not pull the punch. To do so would be to give into the lies that allow Israel to commit such atrocities. God help us all if we let that be misunderstood when historians wade through the lies of Biden, Trump, The New York Times, and Bari Weiss in search of the truth. “The voices on the phone are real.” So is the evil in the air.
In select New York City and Los Angeles theaters December 17th, 2025.
Expanding in 2026 to include Raleigh, NC, on January 30th, 2026.
For more information, head to the official The Voice of Hind Rajab website.
Final Score: 5 out of 5.
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Categories: Films To Watch, In Theaters, Recommendation, Reviews
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