Some films are difficult to recommend because watching them is genuinely painful. The Voice of Hind Rajab is one of them. For me, it may be the most necessary film of 2025, and certainly the one that has affected me most deeply. Not because of what it shows, but because of what it forces us to hear. The overwhelming feeling is one of powerlessness: knowing what is happening, hearing a child asking for help, watching people desperately attempt to reach her, and gradually understanding just how little they are able to do.
Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania takes the real story of six-year-old Hind Rajab, killed in Gaza in January 2024, and constructs an extraordinarily restrained film around the emergency calls she made while trapped in a car. Most importantly, the voice we hear is not recreated by an actress. It is Hind’s real voice. That decision changes everything. The Voice of Hind Rajab exists somewhere between drama, documentary and testimony, and at times it almost becomes difficult to think of it simply as a film.
| Film Title | Movie Details |
|---|---|
| Country | Tunisia |
| Year | 2025 |
| Genre | Drama / Docudrama |
| Runtime | 90 min |
| Director | Kaouther Ben Hania |
| Main Actors | Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Clara Khoury, Amer Hlehel |
On 29 January 2024, volunteers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society receive an emergency call from Gaza. Hind is trapped inside a car and needs someone to come for her. From their office, the emergency workers try to keep contact with the child while simultaneously navigating the procedures necessary to send an ambulance.
That is essentially the film. Ben Hania does not need to manufacture suspense around what happened, nor does she hide the outcome from the audience. Instead, she concentrates almost entirely on the people inside the emergency centre and on the increasingly unbearable distance separating them from the little girl they are trying to save.
This decision is crucial. We do not see Gaza recreated as a battlefield. There are no large-scale sequences of destruction designed to overwhelm us visually. Ben Hania understood that images of war have become frighteningly familiar, particularly after years in which violence has arrived continuously through television and our phones. In her statement for the Venice Film Festival, she explained that she wanted instead to concentrate on what remains invisible: waiting, fear and the silence when help does not arrive.
It is precisely this absence of conventional images of violence that makes the film so brutal.
We remain inside the room while Hind remains somewhere else. The distance is geographical, but it becomes emotional too. Everyone can hear her. Everyone understands the urgency. And still, reaching her becomes an agonisingly complicated process.
Few films communicate impotence so effectively.
The actors have an extremely difficult task because they must respond to recordings of a real child experiencing real terror. Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Clara Khoury and Amer Hlehel play Red Crescent workers based on the real people involved in the calls, and Ben Hania deliberately avoids turning their distress into theatrical spectacle.
Their performances are strongest in the smallest reactions: someone listening, waiting for information, attempting to remain professional or momentarily losing the ability to contain what they are feeling. The office gradually becomes almost claustrophobic. We know that somewhere outside it a child is waiting, yet we are forced to remain there with people whose principal means of reaching her is a telephone.
The use of Hind’s actual recordings inevitably raises difficult questions about representation. There is an enormous ethical difference between dramatizing suffering and allowing the voice of a dead child to become part of a dramatic film. Ben Hania’s approach will not feel comfortable to everyone, nor should it. But the film treats those recordings not as a device for creating suspense but as its reason for existing.
Hind is never reduced to an abstract symbol of childhood in war. She is a child with a name and a voice.
That distinction matters.
There is also something particularly devastating about the contrast between technology and helplessness. A voice can travel from Gaza to an emergency centre. Information can be exchanged. People can know precisely that somebody needs help. Yet knowledge does not necessarily translate into the ability to act.
That is where The Voice of Hind Rajab affected me most. Its horror comes partly from the fact that everyone can hear what is happening. The tragedy does not occur because nobody knows. It unfolds while people know, listen and desperately try to intervene.
The film premiered in competition at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, where it received the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize, the festival’s second-highest competitive honour. It also received several parallel awards in Venice. Later, it won the Audience Award at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, alongside further recognition on the international festival circuit.
Its journey continued all the way to the 98th Academy Awards, where The Voice of Hind Rajab, representing Tunisia, was nominated for Best International Feature Film. It became only the second Tunisian film ever nominated in the category, following The Man Who Sold His Skin in 2021.
Those awards are significant, but The Voice of Hind Rajab is one of those films for which conventional discussions about prizes almost seem secondary.
Its achievement lies elsewhere.
Cinema frequently recreates historical suffering years after the events, once enough distance exists for filmmakers to interpret what happened. Ben Hania made The Voice of Hind Rajab while the wider war in Gaza and its consequences were still unfolding. There is almost no historical distance between the event and the film made from it.
That gives the film an urgency that is difficult to separate from the experience of watching it.
I have seen films in 2025 that are more visually ambitious, more narratively complex or easier to revisit. None has affected me quite like this one. There is a rawness to The Voice of Hind Rajab that stays with you precisely because Ben Hania strips away almost everything that could provide emotional protection. There is no safe distance, no comforting abstraction and very little relief.
Only a room full of people trying to help.
And the voice of a child waiting for them.
The Voice of Hind Rajab may be the most necessary film of 2025 because it refuses to allow that voice to disappear into statistics, headlines or the endless accumulation of images from Gaza. Hind Rajab was six years old. She called for help. And for ninety devastating minutes, the film asks us to listen.
