The Voice of Hind Rajab

Kaouther Ben Hania, Tunsian-born filmmaker living in Paris, wrote this statement about making The Voice of Hind Rajab:

"There was something electric around this project. Here’s how it all began: I was in the middle of the Oscar campaign for Les filles d’Olfa (Four Daughters) and preparing to enter pre-production on a film I had been writing for ten years. Then, during a layover at Los Angeles Intl Airport, everything shifted. 

I heard an audio recording of Hind Rajab begging for help. I immediately felt a mix of helplessness and an overwhelming sadness. I couldn’t carry on as planned. I contacted the Red Crescent and asked them to let me hear the full audio. After listening to it, I knew, without a doubt, that I had to drop everything else. I had to make this film. 

I spoke at length with Hind’s mother, with the real people who were on the other end of that call, those who tried to help her. Then I wove a story around their testimonies, using the real audio recording of Hind’s voice, and building a film where the violence remains off-screen. That was a deliberate choice. 

Violent images are everywhere on our screens, our timelines, our phones. What I wanted was to focus on the invisible: the waiting, the fear, the unbearable sound of silence when help doesn’t come. Sometimes, what you don’t see is more devastating than what you do. 

At the heart of this film is something very simple. I cannot accept a world where a child calls for help and no one comes. That pain, that failure, belongs to all of us. This story is not just about Gaza. It speaks to a universal grief. And I believe that fiction (especially when it draws from verified, painful, real events) is cinema’s most powerful tool. May Hind Rajab’s voice be heard."

Excerpted from the Director's Statement for La Biennale di Venezia

Excerpts from "No Child Deserves to Die Like My Daughter" 

By Hind's mother Wesam Hamada

On Jan. 29, 2024, my daughter Hind’s voice reached me for the last time. It’s been two years, but its absence is still the loudest sound in our home. 

Hind was smart beyond her years. I taught her to write before she ever set foot in a classroom. I still have her first school notebook. When she started school, the teachers were amazed: She had answers to everything, in Arabic and English. 

She loved her little brother, Iyad, with a tenderness I can hardly put into words. She cared for him in ways far beyond her age — a true older sister, a protector. Even now, he asks, “What am I supposed to do without her?” I don’t have the answer. 

No child deserves to die like Hind did, just as no child should live under the constant threat of bombardment, starvation, and displacement. My daughter was just one among tens of thousands of Palestinian children in Gaza whose stories ended before they began.

When the filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania contacted me to make a film about Hind’s last hours, I was hesitant. I was still drowning in grief. The idea of reliving those moments terrified me. But I also knew that if the world did not listen to Hind, her killing would become another lost number. Maybe if the world heard her voice, I thought, other children could be saved. 

Protecting the children in Gaza must mean real protection. It means a ceasefire that actually saves lives, not one that exists only on paper. It means stopping the international flow of weapons to a regime that clearly seeks to crush our spirit and erase us. It means opening more medical corridors and allowing more food in. It means ensuring accountability, not only for Hind’s death but for those of the thousands of children whose lives were stolen. 

I am a mother from Gaza. I once wore my daughter’s scent like armor to keep me going. Now I wear it because it’s all I have left. My daughter Hind’s killing has not broken me. It leaves me with a mother’s responsibility to try to ensure no other child is left unheard.