Oscar Shortlisted | THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB — A Girl’s Cry for Help
In the press kit for her urgent new film THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB, Oscar-nominated filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania writes that cinema “doesn’t report, it remembers. It doesn’t argue, it makes you feel.” That ethos reverberates through every frame of this devastating, Oscar-shortlisted work—an act of cinematic remembrance that bypasses rhetoric and lands directly in the body. Regardless of where one stands on the politics surrounding Gaza, THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB is impossible to watch without being profoundly moved. This is narrative cinema as emotional reckoning.
Based on the true story of six-year-old Hind Rajab, the film revisits the final hours of a child trapped inside her family’s bullet-riddled car after an attack leaves her surrounded by the bodies of her relatives. As Hind pleads for help, responders from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society remain on the phone, struggling to keep her calm while desperately attempting to secure safe passage for an ambulance. Ben Hania constructs the film around the actual emergency call recording, interwoven with performances by actors portraying the Red Crescent workers, resulting in a film that unfolds like a nerve-shredding thriller—precise, immersive, and emotionally overwhelming. Though rigorously researched and rooted in real events, the film is not a documentary. From a filmmaker nominated for both Best International Feature and Best Documentary, that distinction is intentional: this is cinema designed to make us feel.
Selected as Tunisia’s official submission for the Academy Award for Best International Feature and recently named to the Oscar shortlist, THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB opens theatrically in New York and Los Angeles on December 17, before expanding across the U.S. In this episode of INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE, we sit down with Kaouther Ben Hania to explore how this extraordinary film came to be, the ethical weight of dramatizing real trauma, and the power of cinema to preserve memory when the world moves on.
🎙️ Listen now to our conversation with Kaouther Ben Hania—only on INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE.
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New York Los Angeles theatrical release December 17
Indie international film US release
Inside the Arthouse Kaouther Ben Hania interview
Oscar shortlisted foreign language film
Cinema that remembers not reports
THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB
Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania
Distributed by WILLA
https://www.youtube.com/@weluvwilla
With support from Watermelon Pictures and Film4
https://www.youtube.com/@watermelonpictures
https://www.youtube.com/@Film4
Listen to the full conversation on INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE.
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