Enough of the Mass Killing, Starvation, Dehumanization

The filmmakers behind the Gaza-set drama The Voice of Hind Rajab, one of the most anticipated movies at this year’s Venice Film Festival, used the opportunity of the project’s first major press conference to make a powerful plea for peace. After the film’s director, Kaouther Ben Hania, was greeted by a lengthy standing ovation, her star, Palestinian-Canadian actress Saja Kilani, read a prepared statement on behalf of her collaborators:

“On behalf of all of us actors, and in the name of the entire team, we ask, ‘Isn’t it enough?’ Enough of the mass killing, the starvation, the dehumanization, the destruction, the ongoing occupation. The Voice of Hind Rajab does not need our defense. This film is not an opinion or a fantasy. It is anchored in truth. Hind’s story carries the weight of an entire people. Hind’s voice is one amongst tens of thousands of children that were killed in Gaza in the last two years alone. It is the voice of every daughter and every son 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. Behind every number is a story that never got to be told. Hind’s story is about a child crying out, “Save me.” And the real question is, how have we let a child beg for life? No one can live in peace, while even one child is forced to plea for survival. Let Hind’s voice echo around the world. Let it remind you of the silence that has been built around Gaza. Let it name the genocide that silence protects and let it pierce the world enough — not tomorrow, not someday — now, for justice, for the sake of humanity, for the future of every child enough. I thank you.”

Last week, just as the Venice festival was getting underway, industry heavyweights including Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Alfonso Cuaron and Jonathan Glazer, boarded The Voice of Hind Rajab as executive producers, boosting its profile ahead of its world premiere.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is based on the final, real-life calls of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was trapped in a car in Gaza on January 29, 2024, after Israeli tank fire killed her relatives. The Palestine Red Crescent Society stayed on the line with the child for more than an hour as she pleaded for rescue. An ambulance sent to reach her was itself destroyed, killing the two medics on board. Hind’s voice — fragments of which spread online and were later verified and analyzed by outlets including The Washington Post, Sky News and Forensic Architecture — became one of the most haunting and emblematic testaments of the war in Gaza: a desperate plea heard around the world — met with silence.

Denied access to Gaza but determined to respond, Ben Hania contacted the Red Crescent and Hind’s family, eventually obtaining the full 70-minute recording. Out of that raw material, she constructed a hybrid narrative, centering on the voices of the Red Crescent workers who tried, against impossible odds, to save the child. Palestinian actors play the medics, but the voice of Hind we hear is her own, from the original recording of that day.

Ben Hania has been inventively blurring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction for more than a decade, crafting work that moves between dramatization and documentary while remaining anchored in lived experience. Her feature debut, The Challat of Tunis (2014), used documentary techniques to probe a local urban legend. Beauty and the Dogs (2017) dramatized the aftermath of a sexual assault in Tunis with unsettling precision.

Recent work has catapulted Ben Hania to global recognition. In 2020, she became the first Tunisian director nominated for an Academy Award with The Man Who Sold His Skin, a satirical drama about a Syrian refugee whose body becomes a commodity. Three years later, her hybrid doc Four Daughters — part testimony, part re-enactment — bowed at Cannes, went on to win the prize for best documentary, and was nominated for an Oscar.