{"id":680576,"date":"2026-01-07T19:33:09","date_gmt":"2026-01-07T19:33:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/680576\/"},"modified":"2026-01-07T19:33:09","modified_gmt":"2026-01-07T19:33:09","slug":"it-felt-like-she-was-asking-me-to-save-her-the-film-based-on-a-five-year-old-palestinian-girls-dying-pleas-movies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/680576\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It felt like she was asking me to save her\u2019: the film based on a five-year-old Palestinian girl\u2019s dying pleas | Movies"},"content":{"rendered":"

When Kaouther Ben Hania heard Hind Rajab\u2019s voice for the first time, she was in Los Angeles airport scrolling through social media. The five-year-old\u2019s cry for help cut through the clamour around her. This was in February 2024 and Hind had already been dead for at least a week, left to bleed out among the corpses of six of her relatives after their car was targeted by an Israeli tank, leaving it with 335 bullet holes, according to the Forensic Architecture research group<\/a>.<\/p>\n

More than 20,000 Palestinian children were killed in two years of Israeli bombardment of Gaza, according to UN estimates. Another 82 have been killed since 10 October when a ceasefire was declared and then routinely breached. The pictures of the dead have often been published online, including those of Hind, showing her dressed in pink with a floral tiara, or smiling in an oversized academic cap and gown, but her voice also remains to haunt the world after her death.<\/p>\n

It premiered at Venice, receiving a 23-minute standing ovation \u2013 the longest in the festival\u2019s history<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Palestine<\/a> Red Crescent Society (PRCS) posted audio recordings of her last hours, made by the organisation\u2019s emergency call centre via a mobile phone in the car, as Hind repeatedly, desperately, appealed for someone to rescue her. On the same recording, we can hear the increasingly fraught workers at the centre promising her that help would soon be on the way.<\/p>\n

When Ben Hania heard Hind\u2019s voice, it brought her to an abrupt halt in the airport terminal, as travellers milled around her. This was a young child calling on adults to protect her amid the appeal of Palestine to be saved from genocide \u2013 and on both counts, the world had failed. \u201cWhen I heard her voice, for that millisecond, it felt as if she was asking me to save her,\u201d she says. \u201cThere was something very immediate in her voice, and it was very shocking.\u201d<\/p>\n

Increasingly fraught … actors playing the four Palestine Red Crescent workers who deal with Hind\u2019s call. Photograph: Ent-movie\/Alamy<\/p>\n

The Tunisian director was between stops on a US tour promoting her latest film, having already begun work on her next. But she immediately cleared her calendar so she could start a new film based around Hind\u2019s voice. \u201cIt was in my head for days and days,\u201d says Ben Hania. \u201cI felt a very strong sense of sadness and helplessness. I was wondering, \u2018What can I do?\u2019 The only thing I know how to do is make movies.\u201d<\/p>\n

The outline of the film began to take shape as Ben Hania researched the circumstances of the recording. She found out that the clips the PRCS had put online were just fragments. They had recorded the whole call, lasting three hours, and they sent it all to Ben Hania. Listening to all of it, knowing how it would end, was \u201cone of the most difficult things I\u2019ve heard in my life\u201d, she says.<\/p>\n

There was one last thing to be done before starting work \u2013 calling Hind\u2019s mother, Wissam Hamada, who was in mourning in Gaza. \u201cI told her, \u2018I want to do a movie. Tell me if you don\u2019t want me to and I won\u2019t do it. And she told me, \u2018I don\u2019t want my daughter to be forgotten. I want justice for my daughter. So if this movie can help, do it please.\u2019 So it started.\u201d<\/p>\n

The result, called simply The Voice of Hind Rajab, is a dramatic recreation of the tragedy as it unfurled in the narrow confines of the Red Crescent call centre, with actors playing the roles of the four emergency workers who were on the other end of the line \u2013 but Hind\u2019s voice is her own. The actors respond to the real voice, trying to encourage and console Hind as the emergency workers had done, recreating the agony of their ultimate failure.<\/p>\n

Many films contain images that cannot be unseen. The Voice of Hind Rajab cannot be unheard. Ben Hania succeeded in the task that Hamada entrusted her with, to make her daughter unforgettable. As Ben Hania puts it: \u201cTo honour her voice and make it echo.\u201d Hind\u2019s insistent cries for someone, anyone, to \u201ccome to get me\u201d can never now be silenced. They summon up the unfathomable cruelty of Israel\u2019s campaign in Gaza, and the collective failure of the rest of the world to stop the killing.<\/p>\n

Hollywood backers \u2026 director Kaouther Ben Hania, right, with Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara. Photograph: Elisabetta A Villa\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

Ben Hania, who is speaking to me during a recent visit to London, has situated the film somewhere in the borderland between drama and documentary where she has made her career. Her film studies thesis at the Sorbonne University in Paris explored that frontier. Her first film, Challatt Tunes (The Blade of Tunis), was a mockumentary about sexism and violence against women in Tunisia, and her later works have ranged from dramas loosely based on true stories to an intimate documentary about a young Tunisian girl exiled in Canada. \u201cThe frontier between the genres is something like the frontier between countries,\u201d she says. \u201cWhen you are walking, you don\u2019t realise when you\u2019ve entered another country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ben Hania\u2019s film Four Daughters<\/a>, which she was promoting in early 2024 when she heard Hind\u2019s voice, is about a Tunisian mother called Olfa Hamrouni who has four girls, two of whom have embraced radical Islam and left to join Islamic State. The film plays with the conventions of documentary and drama, intertwining them, so that the real Hamrouni and her two remaining daughters meet the actors who portray them as well the missing girls. The real family comment throughout on their emotions as they watch their drama unfurled before them.<\/p>\n

\u201cSince I\u2019m drawn to real stories, I always ask myself what is the best form to tell the story,\u201d the 48-year-old says. \u201cFilm-making is about making choices \u2013 where to tell the story, how to tell it, in which way, in which form. And to make those choices, I always try to stay faithful to the first moment I encountered the story \u2013 what I felt. Because cinema is about emotion.\u201d<\/p>\n

During the process of making The Voice of Hind Rajab, she kept going back to the first time she heard that voice and what she felt. \u201cThis sense of helplessness. I thought, \u2018If I am feeling this, what was it like for the real people who were listening?\u2019 What they felt is a condensation of what we are feeling \u2013 so many of us around the world \u2013 about what is happening in Gaza. This sense of helplessness. Nobody can reach her to help.\u201d<\/p>\n

A rescue worker pinpoints Hind\u2019s position in an image from the film. Photograph: Ent-movie\/Alamy<\/p>\n

The film acutely conveys the torment of the two men and two women who are in the emergency call centre. They know there is an ambulance in Gaza City just a few minutes away from Hind and ready to go. But the PRCS has to formally request, through intermediaries, the Israeli army\u2019s permission to approach the area. That permission does not come for hours, as the wounded girl audibly begins to fade.<\/p>\n

Send the ambulance anyway, the younger man in the call centre demands, at the end of his tether. But his boss has seen too many ambulance workers die. Their pictures are up on his wall and he has pledged to resign if any more are killed on his watch. In the end, the green light finally comes, but Hind cannot be saved.<\/p>\n

Ben Hania realised she had managed to pierce, however fleetingly, the global impassivity towards slaughter in Gaza<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even though the audience knows how the story ends, it is still heartbreaking. It is easier to look away than to witness the killing of a child in harrowing detail. Ben Hania feared her film could simply fade into obscurity, a subtitled Arabic tale of something too hard to face. But at a critical moment, a group of Hollywood stars \u2013 including Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara, together with directors Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n and Jonathan Glazer \u2013 stepped in to back the project as executive producers.<\/p>\n

The film was picked by the Venice film festival where it premiered in September, receiving a 23-minute standing ovation<\/a>, the longest in the festival\u2019s history. It could have gone on longer, but the cinema had to be cleared so the next movie could be shown. It was only at that moment that Ben Hania realised she had managed to pierce, however fleetingly, the global impassivity that has surrounded two years of slaughter in Gaza.<\/p>\n

\u201cSo many children have been killed that we are entering a zone of amnesia and insensitivity,\u201d she says. \u201cWe\u2019re numb, but cinema, literature and art can change things. At some point, you are done explaining. It is now about feeling what it is like to be in someone else\u2019s shoes. That is another level \u2013 and cinema can do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

The Voice of Hind Rajab is released in the UK on 16 January<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When Kaouther Ben Hania heard Hind Rajab\u2019s voice for the first time, she was in Los Angeles airport…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":680577,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[77,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-680576","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-uk","10":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115855491424208782","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680576","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=680576"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/680576\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/680577"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=680576"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=680576"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=680576"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}