“I felt like she was asking me to save her”: The film is based on the dying pleas of a five-year-old Palestinian girl | film

WWhen Kawthar Ben Hania heard Hind Ragab’s voice for the first time, she was at Los Angeles Airport browsing social media. The five-year-old girl’s cry for help cut through the clamor around her. It was February 2024, and Hind had been dead for at least a week, left bleeding among the bodies of six of her relatives after an Israeli tank targeted their car, sustaining 335 bullet wounds, according to the Forensic Architecture Research Group.

More than 20,000 Palestinian children were killed during two years of Israeli bombing of Gaza, according to United Nations estimates. A further 82 people have been killed since October 10, when a ceasefire was declared and then routinely violated. Photos of the dead are often posted online, including those of Hind, which show her dressed in pink with a crown of flowers, or smiling while wearing an oversized academic cap and gown, but her voice also continues to haunt the world after her death.

The Palestine Red Crescent Society published audio recordings of her final hours, recorded by the organization’s emergency call center via mobile phone in the car, where Hind repeatedly appealed for someone to save her. In the same recording, we can hear increasingly nervous workers at the center promising her that help will be on the way soon.

When Ben Hania heard Hind’s voice, she suddenly stopped in the airport lounge, while the passengers were crowding around her. This was a little girl pleading with adults to protect her amid the call to save Palestine from genocide – and in both cases, the world failed. “When I heard her voice, in that thousandth of a second, it felt like she was asking me to save her,” she says. “There was something so immediate in her voice, it was so shocking.”

The Tunisian director was between two stops on a tour in the United States to promote her latest film, having already begun work on her next film. But she immediately cleared her calendar so she could start a new film centered around Hind’s voice. “It was in my head for days and days,” Ben Hania says. “I felt a very strong sense of sadness and helplessness. I wondered: ‘What can I do?’ The only thing I know how to do is make films.”

The outlines of the film began to take shape when Ben Hania researched the recording conditions. I discovered that the clips posted by the Palestinian Red Crescent on the Internet were just fragments. They recorded the entire call, which lasted three hours, and sent it all to Ben Hania. Listening to all of that, and knowing how it would end, was “one of the hardest things I’ve ever heard in my life,” she says.

There was one last thing to do before starting work, which was to call Hind’s mother, Wissam Hamada, who was mourning in Gaza. “I told her: ‘I want to make a movie. Tell me if you don’t want me to do it and I won’t do it.’ And she said to me: ‘I don’t want my daughter to be forgotten.’ I want justice for my daughter. So if this film can help, please do so,” she began.

The result, called simply “Hind Rajab’s Voice,” is a dramatic recreation of the tragedy that unfolded in the cramped confines of a Red Crescent call centre, with actors playing the roles of the four emergency workers on the other end of the line — but Hind’s voice is her own. The actors respond to the real voice, trying to encourage and comfort Hind as the emergency workers did, recreating the agony of their ultimate failure.

Many films contain images that cannot be seen. Hind Rajab’s voice cannot be heard. Ben Hania succeeded in the mission entrusted to her by Hamada, which was to make her daughter unforgettable. As Ben Hania says: “To honor her voice and make it resonate.” Hind’s urgent cries for someone, anyone, to “come get me” cannot be silenced now. It recalls the unimaginable cruelty of the Israeli campaign in Gaza, and the collective failure of the rest of the world to stop the killing.

Ben Hania, who spoke with me during my recent visit to London, places the film somewhere in the borderland between drama and documentary where her career began. Her film studies thesis at the Sorbonne in Paris explored those boundaries. Her first film, Shalat Tounes (The Tunisia Code), was a mockumentary about sexism and violence against women in Tunisia, and her subsequent works have ranged from dramas based on true stories to an intimate documentary about a young Tunisian girl exiled in Canada. “The borders between literary genres are like the borders between countries,” she says. “When you walk, you don’t realize you’ve entered another country.”

Ben Hania’s film Four Daughters, which she was promoting in early 2024 when she heard Hind’s voice, is about a Tunisian mother named Olfa Hamrouni who has four daughters, two of whom converted to radical Islam and left to join ISIS. The film plays with the conventions of documentary and drama, intertwining the two, as the real Hamrouni and her two remaining daughters meet the actors portraying them as well as the missing girls. The real family comments all the time on their feelings as they watch the drama unfold in front of them.

“Since I am drawn to true stories, I always ask myself what is the best way to tell a story,” says the 48-year-old. “Filmmaking is about making choices – where to tell the story, how to tell it, in what way, in what form. And in order to make those choices, I always try to stay true to the first moment I encountered the story – and how I felt. Because cinema is about emotion.”

During the process of creating Hind Rajab’s voice, she kept going back to the first time she heard that voice and what it felt like. “This feeling of helplessness. I thought: ‘If I was feeling this, what would it be like for the real people who were listening?’ What they felt was an intensification of what we – many of us around the world – feel about what is happening in Gaza. This feeling of helplessness. No one can reach out to help her.”

The film vividly conveys the torment of the two men and women at the emergency call center. They know that there is an ambulance in Gaza City, a few minutes away from Hind, ready to go. But the Palestine Red Crescent Society must formally request, through intermediaries, the Israeli army’s permission to approach the area. This permission does not come until hours later, as the wounded girl begins to audibly fade away.

Send the ambulance anyway, demands the younger man at the call center, at the end of his rope. But his boss saw too many ambulance workers die. Their pictures hang on his wall, and he has vowed to resign if more of them are killed during his term. In the end, the green light finally comes, but Hind cannot be saved.

Even though the audience knows how the story ends, it is still heartbreaking. It is easier to look away than to witness the murder of a child in horrific detail. Ben Hania fears that her film, an Arabic-subtitled story about something difficult to confront, will simply fade into obscurity. But at a critical moment, a group of Hollywood stars — including Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, and Rooney Mara, along with directors Alfonso Cuaron and Jonathan Glazer — stepped in to back the project as executive producers.

The film was selected by the Venice Film Festival where it premiered in September, receiving a 23-minute standing ovation, the longest in the festival’s history. It could have gone on longer, but the cinema had to be evacuated so the next film could be shown. It was only at that moment that Ben Hania realized that she had managed, albeit fleetingly, to break through the global stalemate that had surrounded two years of carnage in Gaza.

“So many children have been killed that we are entering a zone of amnesia and insensitivity,” she says. “We’re numb, but cinema, literature and art can change things. At some point, you’re done explaining. Now it’s about feeling what it means to be in someone else’s shoes. That’s another level – and cinema can do that.”