- Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Clara Khoury
- January 16th 2026
- 89
- Kaouther Ben Hania
Workers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) receive an emergency call from a young girl trapped inside a car.
The Voice of Hind Rajab is thought to have broken the record for standing ovations at the Venice Film Festival in September after the audience applauded the film for more than 20 minutes. Now, U.K. audiences can discover why it received such a response.
This vital docudrama, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, is a reconstruction of a call between workers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) centre and a five-year-old girl named Hind Rajab on 29 January 2024.
Rajab is trapped inside a car riddled with bullets in Gaza after being targeted by an Israeli tank. Her relatives are dead, she is all alone with their bodies, and she needs to be rescued as soon as possible.
She repeatedly pleads with emergency operators Omar (Motaz Malhees) and Rana (Saja Kilani) to get her, but they can’t simply send an ambulance into an active warzone.
As the title may suggest, The Voice of Hind Rajab uses the real audio recordings between Rajab and the PRCS. The PRCS team are played by actors, who respond to the real voice of Rajab, and some scenes were meticulously recreated from footage taken that day.
But there are imagined scenes that take place away from Omar’s desk. He frequently goes into the office of his boss, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), to plead with him to send an ambulance to help Rajab, even though he knows it’s not that simple.
Mahdi can’t simply call an ambulance and send it to her location, only several minutes away. There is a chain of command he must follow, with many steps and intermediaries, to get permission to go into the area safely. This process takes hours and it is maddening.
During this time, they have to maintain a calm and collected tone with Rajab to keep her company and reassure her that help is on the way.
Over the course of the film, Omar feels increasingly helpless and frustrated, and he takes his anger out on Mahdi, yelling at him to send the ambulance without the go-ahead.
It is intense, stressful and you can empathise with their agony, but the repetitive shouting does grate after a while.
However, it doesn’t feel right to point out a film’s flaws when the subject matter is so important and timely, and the real-life story is so harrowing and upsetting.
The Voice of Hind Rajab should be required viewing for all. Be prepared to be stunned into silence as the credits roll.
In cinemas from Friday 16th January.
By Hannah Wales.
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