What strikes you first is the silence before the voice. In Kaouther Ben Hania's film, the crackling audio of a five-year-old girl calling for help from a car surrounded by the dead arrives not as spectacle, but as something closer to a summons. The voice is real. The girl, Hind Rajab, died in that wrecked car in Gaza in January 2024. And now, for audiences willing to sit with that fact, her final words are coming to Australian cinemas.
The Voice of Hind Rajab opens in Australia on 5 March, arriving with the weight of a record-breaking 23-minute standing ovation from Venice Film Festival audiences and a Silver Lion prize, the festival's second-highest honour. The film was widely expected to take the top prize, the Golden Lion, before Alexander Payne's jury chose Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother instead, a decision that was met with considerable surprise from critics and audiences alike, as first reported by the Sydney Morning Herald.
Ben Hania, a Tunisian filmmaker based in France, constructed the film around a specific, documented event. Hind's call to the Palestinian Red Crescent had been recorded. Emergency workers spent hours on the line with her, able to identify her location, knowing an ambulance was only eight minutes away. The ambulance was never permitted to reach her. Both the ambulance crew and Hind died that day.
The film is set almost entirely inside the Red Crescent's cramped operations centre, where a small team of workers, played by Palestinian actors, attempts to thread passage for a rescue vehicle through a labyrinth of military protocols. Every phone call, every transfer to a Red Cross liaison, every request passed to Israel's Ministry of Defence, is rendered in real time. The bureaucratic obstruction is not dramatised for effect; Ben Hania has said she consulted closely with the real workers involved.
"For ordinary people living their life, when a child calls asking for help, all over the world you send it immediately," Ben Hania has said. "But people don't know the reality of occupation. What does occupation mean? It means that there are Kafkaesque rules to make the lives of the colonised impossible."
The most contested creative decision was the use of Hind's actual recorded voice. Ben Hania says she dismissed the idea of using a child actor "after 50 seconds" and sought the blessing of Hind's mother, Wesam Hamada, before proceeding. "For a mother it is perhaps the most horrible thing to lose a child, but her mother is one of the most courageous and most resilient persons," Ben Hania has said. "For her, it was very important that her daughter should have justice. Which she hasn't."
The Palestinian cast members were fitted with earpieces and heard Hind's voice for the first time on the day filming began. The actors, Ben Hania says, sometimes forgot they were acting. "All my actors are Palestinian, so already they are bringing their life, their experience and their share of tragedies. For them and for me, it was beyond acting."
That authenticity has not shielded the film from serious criticism. Writing in Variety, critic Guy Lodge described it as "a blunt instrument" and questioned the layering of thriller conventions over material that, he argued, hardly needed extra emotional amplification. In The Guardian, Peter Bradshaw raised the question of exploitation, wondering whether the same ground might have been covered just as effectively through a straightforward documentary format.
These are fair concerns, and not ones that dissolve simply because the cause is sympathetic. The ethics of using a child's dying voice as dramatic material sit in genuinely uncomfortable territory, regardless of the filmmaker's intentions or the parent's consent. Art made from real suffering carries obligations that go beyond good faith, and audiences are entitled to weigh them.
Ben Hania anticipated the charge of propaganda and has addressed it directly. "I don't know which movie-maker said it, but someone did: that every movie is the propaganda of its director. In cinema, you choose a point of view. That is already a political decision and you can't do movies otherwise." She argues that to call the film propaganda is to attempt to silence Hind Rajab a second time.
A constellation of prominent Hollywood figures, including Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón and Jonathan Glazer, signed on as executive producers, lending the project both resources and profile. Their involvement points to something real about how the film functions: it is fierce in its sympathies, but it does not traffic in slogans. The Red Crescent workers argue with each other, lose patience, and pour their fear into ideological disputes that go nowhere. It is a portrait of people trying and failing in impossible circumstances, not a piece of agitprop.
If there is a lesson here, it is one that resists simple telling. The film raises genuine questions about what cinema can and should do with documented atrocity, about the line between bearing witness and appropriating grief, and about whether artistic intent is sufficient justification for creative choices that touch the most raw and private of human experiences. Reasonable people will come down differently on those questions, and Ben Hania would likely say that is exactly the point. The conversation, she seems to believe, is itself a form of justice. For the Red Crescent and Red Cross movement workers who spent that day trying to reach a child they could hear but not save, it may be the only form currently available.
The Voice of Hind Rajab, distributed in Australia by Madman Films, opens in cinemas nationally from 5 March. The film is rated MA15+. For context on the broader conflict and its humanitarian dimensions, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency maintains updated information on conditions in Gaza. The Screen Australia agency continues to support Australian engagement with international co-productions and the distribution of significant foreign-language cinema in Australia.