Showtimes
Sunday, January 11, 2026
Palm Springs Cultural Center 1
By Robert St. Martin
Palm Springs, CA (The Hollywood Times) 1/10/26 – Yet another cinematic exploration of the impact of the Israeli invasion of Gaza with a chilling account told with the recorded words of a young Palestinian girl is The Voice of Hin Rajab – a documentary made by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther. Ben Hania. Followers of North African/Middle Eastern cinema are probably familiar with the work of Kaouther Ben Hania, whose documentary Four Daughters was featured at AFI FEST in 2023 and went on to win many awards at international film festivals.
In this bold and inspired move, Ben Hania utilizes the real audio of cell phone calls by this young Palestinian girl Hind Rajab to her family as the sound track to the film. Hind’s phone calls in the film, blurring the line between fiction and documentary, yet never feeling exploitative; in fact, Ben Hania made the film with the support of Hind’s mother and the valiant real-life workers who coordinated the rescue effort. The Voice of Hin Rajab is Tunisia’s Oscar entry for Best International Feature Film.
The film tells the story of a young Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab, who was killed by Israeli forces in Gaza last year along with six of her family members. Rajab and her family had been fleeing Gaza City when their vehicle was shelled, killing her uncle, aunt, and three cousins. Rajab and another cousin survived and contacted the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) seeking aid. The car was later found with both Rajab and the paramedics dead. Rajab’s death sparked global protests, most notably at Columbia University, where students renamed Hamilton Hall as Hind’s Hall. The American rapper Macklemore also released a protest song called Hind’s Hall.
In a bold and inspired move, Ben Hania utilizes the real audio of Hind’s phone calls in the film, blurring the line between fiction and documentary, yet never feeling exploitative; in fact, Ben Hania made the film with the support of Hind’s mother and the valiant real-life workers who coordinated the rescue effort.
The film reconstructs the final, frantic phone call of Hind Rajab, who in January 2024 was trapped in the wreckage of a car in northern Gaza, surrounded by the bodies of her uncles and four young cousins. Hiding beneath a seat and the only one still alive, Hind managed to contact the Palestinian Red Crescent by phone. However, the child and the medics looking for her were killed by Israeli forces.
The film incorporates the real-life recording of the last words ever spoken by Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian child killed on Jan. 29, 2024, after her family’s car was shelled by Israeli forces during their invasion of the Gaza Strip. In her final hours, the girl repeatedly phoned call-center volunteers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society, pleading for a rescue vehicle that never made it to help. The Israeli military has not announced a formal investigation into the case.
Rajab’s shattering half of her dialogue with the Red Crescent workers is presented in the film nearly in full, but integrated into a heated dramatization of the call-center conflict surrounding her case. Actors speak and react to Rajab’s own desperate voice, while the film, set wholly within the Red Crescent’s beigely neutral offices, conjures a fraught ticking-clock atmosphere as precious minutes of inaction pass by. With Rajab seen only via archival photos, the film shares in the volunteers’ frustration at their distance from her, and audiences surely will too.
Young, impassioned volunteer Omar (Mataz Malhees) first answers the call from Rajab, who’s hiding from IDF soldiers in the wreckage of her car, surrounded by the dead bodies of her uncle, aunt and four cousins. Omar’s so stricken by her plight that he’s unable to do much to calm her, and as his gentle-natured colleague Rana (Saja Kilani) takes over the call, he turns to stoic supervisor Mahdi (Amer Hlehel) to hasten the assignment of a rescue team.
Ambulances can only be commanded in a certain order, on a certain route, and the green light in Rajab’s case is slow to be given by the authorities above their heads. As we gaze over digital aerial maps of the destroyed city, and follow onscreen cursors of rescue vehicles inching agonizingly through ruined, rubble-blocked streets, all while the voice on the phone increasingly tightens with terror, The Voice of Hind Rajab turns queasily into a hopeless kind of tension exercise – a race against time that we already know is lost.
Ben Hania said: “When I first heard the voice of Hind Rajab, there was something beyond her words. It was the voice of Gaza itself calling for help – and no one could reach her.” The film makes chilling use of the real phone recordings of Hind, but tells the story through a dramatized Red Crescent team which is trying to coordinate her rescue.
In a statement on behalf of the entire film-making team, actor Saja Kilani said: “The voice of Hind Rajab does not need our defence. This film is not an opinion or a fantasy. It is anchored in truth. Hind’s story carries the weight of an entire people, it is not hers alone.
“Her voice is one among 19,000 children who lost their lives in Gaza in the last two years alone. It is the voice of every mother, father, doctor, teacher, artist, journalist, volunteer, paramedic, each with the right to live, to dream, to exist in dignity, yet all of it was stolen in front of unblinking eyes. And these are only the voices we know. Beyond every number is a story that never got to be told.”
Motaz Malhees, a Palestinian actor from Jenin, said: “When I was 10 years old, I lived this life. Hearing Hind’s voice took me straight back to my childhood. I felt as if I had died a thousand times. This wasn’t acting. This was my life.”
Hind’s mother, Wissam Hamada, said she hoped the film would help end the war. “The whole world has left us to die, to go hungry, to live in fear and to be forcibly displaced without doing anything,” Hamada told AFP by phone from Gaza City, where she lives with her five-year-old son.
Brad Pitt, Jonathan Glazer, Joaquin Phoenix and Alfonso Cuarón serve as executive producers on the drama. Phoenix and Rooney Mara, who also joined the project as executive producers. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in September 2025, where it received a 23-minute standing ovation.
