For more than a decade, Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania has blurred the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, 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.

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 in competition at Cannes, went on to win the prize for best documentary, and was nominated for an Oscar.

Her latest feature, The Voice of Hind Rajab, which premieres in competition at Venice before heading to Toronto, pushes that interplay of documentary and dramatization further than ever before. The film is based on the final 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 only 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.

For the director, The Voice of Hind Rajab was a work of responsibility: “I was afraid that I’d fail her voice, that my movie would not honor Hind’s memory,” she admits.

If Four Daughters interrogated the boundary between memory and performance, The Voice of Hind Rajab forces audiences to confront the line between witnessing and complicity. That question sits at the heart of The Voice of Hind Rajab, a film built around a child’s plea that the world heard but did not answer. It confronts not only the silence that met Hind’s call but also the broader complicity of those — including the international media — who bear witness to suffering in Gaza without being able, or willing, to provide help for the voices calling out.

The project has also drawn high-profile support from Hollywood figures including Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón and Jonathan Glazer, who have all come aboard as executive producers on the film, raising the hope that Hind’s voice — once ignored — may now carry further. Tunisia has selected the film as its official entry for the Academy Awards in the best international feature category.

Kaouther Ben Hania spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about building a cinematic language for grief and testimony, the ethical weight of representing Hind’s final moments, and the need to refuse complicity: “At least, with this film, I wasn’t silenced.”

How did you first hear about Hind’s story and what made you feel compelled to tell it as a film?
When the Red Crescent shared an extract of her call it was all over the internet. It’s how we encounter all the horrible things coming from Gaza these days. I was very affected by the voice, this little girl asking for help. It stayed with me. After that, I heard the Red Crescent had a full recording so I contacted them. When I heard the recording, what haunted me was not just the violence of what happened, but the silence between the sounds. I was prepped for another movie, but I had to stop everything and tell this story.

I felt like my part as a filmmaker was to find the best, most cinematic way to transmit what I received: this recording, this voice. Everything was already there. I just had to find out from which perspective I wanted to tell it.

How did you land on your approach?
Through talking with real people, with Hind’s mother. The story was already written. What is crazy about this story is that it was written with all the rules of storytelling, but it’s real. Reality has gone way beyond fiction. I had to talk to the mother, because if she told me she didn’t want the movie made, I’d drop everything and tell her: “You’re right. It’s your daughter. It’s your grief, it’s your mourning.” I talked to her and she’s a wonderful woman. One of the kindest people I ever spoke with. One of the most generous with her time. She told me about Hind. Then I talked to the Red Crescent employees who were on the phone. It was the same process. Do you want me to tell this story?

Once I was sure they also had the desire to share this story with the world, I turned to the material, the recording, which was the beating heart of the movie. That was very important because when I hear Hind’s voice, I immediately go back to the feeling I felt the first time I heard Hind’s voice: all the helplessness, the anger, and the sadness. I wanted to help her, which was irrational, because this was days after the tragedy. I thought: the Red Crescent people who talked to her, the people she was asking to help her, this must have been what they felt. For me, their perspective was the best way to translate how I felt, to show her asking for help through them. She was asking everybody for help, and anyone who hears this recording feels as if she is asking them for help.

All the recordings in the film are the original recordings, right? Did you adjust or change anything for narrative or dramatic purposes?
I started by doing a script from the calls, and when we did those scenes, the actors were hearing the real voice of Hind on their headsets. In the sound design, we kept the original audio in the movie, keeping the voice with all the dirt, the jamming of the sound. We didn’t clean up the voice but kept it close to the recording. The actor talking is in their own voice but Hind’s voice stayed the same.

In the editing, there was one very long, long moment where she is saying, over and over again, “Come and get me,” and the person on the other end of the line keeps saying, “Yes, we are coming.” “Come and get me.” “Yes, we are coming.” Like 15 times. I couldn’t put all 15 in, so the idea was to translate her despair, to translate the reality of the situation. It was very delicate work to both preserve the authenticity of the recording but also make the story go forward.

So we did some editing, but not in the real recordings. We have the first recording of the cousins as they lay dying. Then there was the message from the uncle, saying there is a six-year-old still in the car. Then the calls from Hind. And we have the recording of the call of the paramedic going to help her. It was very faithful to what happened.

Did that authenticity carry over into the set design?
Yes, we took a lot of inspiration from the Red Crescent headquarters in Ramallah. It is like we show, a very open space. We reproduced a lot of things directly. It’s not 100 percent faithful, but we tried to get close.

What was the most challenging aspect of telling the story?
I think the most challenging thing was the weight of honoring this child’s story. It was a huge responsibility. I was afraid that I’d fail her voice, that my movie would not honor her memory. That was what caused the most anxiety on my side.

Has her mother and the members of the Red Crescent seen the film?
For me, it was very important that the Red Crescent people see the movie. We organized a screening at the Red Crescent in their offices. For the mother, it’s very complicated, because she’s still in Gaza. We can only exchange texts when she has internet. But we are in contact with her family outside of Gaza, and they saw the movie, and they told her about it. Her brother, who she’s very close to and trusts, said she told him she thought it was very good.

What’s your assessment of how Hind’s story has been told so far, particularly in the Western media?
Well, there was an investigation in The Washington Post, which was a very good journalistic investigation to find out what really happened. There still hasn’t been a serious criminal investigation into what happened to Hind. But, as you know, journalists don’t have access to Gaza, so I’m not very interested in what journalists say.

I’m interested in hearing from Hind’s mother. I’m interested in real people. So I did my own — not investigation, because I’m not an investigative journalist — but I did my own listening, my own feeling.

What are your hopes or expectations from the film?
I hope that people will see. I had control over the making of the movie. I have no control over its reception. For me, the first step is that they go and see it, which already is very important.

Do you sense a change in the reception of stories coming out of Gaza, particularly in the West?
I don’t know about the future. I hope things actually change. But the Palestinian perspective is always suspected. It’s a huge topic, and it goes beyond my movie. I hope it will change, and it should change. It’s ridiculous to have to say the Palestinian people are human; they have feelings. When someone dies, they are sad. We find ourselves telling obvious things.

This is a very vast question. But there is something about the silencing of Palestinian voices. That’s why this movie is called The Voice of Hind Rajab. Hind Rajab’s story, for me, is emblematic of this silencing. Because everybody could hear her voice on the internet, but nobody came to help her or to help all the children who were killed after her. We are talking about Hind. But she’s not the only child killed in Gaza. You can see the numbers, read the names, the list of the dead children. It’s shameful.

This is a story about calling for help but nobody comes. And there is a complicit silence and hiding [in the media].

You asked me what I hope for with this film, and if I can succeed in making her voice heard, that already will be something. It’s ridiculous because when someone is crying for help, they should be heard. But there is this racist thing about the Palestinian voice, where many don’t even give them credit for being human. This is why I wanted to tell her story through the lens of cinema, because cinema can provoke this precious thing called empathy. And empathy is precisely the precious thing we often miss when talking about Gaza and the Palestinians.

There have been attempts to bring a war crimes investigation against the military officers allegedly responsible for the killing. How hopeful are you that the truth will be investigated, and people responsible brought to justice?
I don’t predict the future, but while we are talking about Hind, the death toll in Gaza is so high, I don’t know if one could calculate the number of years required for a real investigation into each case. With Hind, we are doing this movie, and the case has not even been investigated. There are no journalists. We still, today, live in this world where you can’t investigate truth. You can’t investigate what happened. But I hope it will happen one day because people need justice.

How has making this film changed you personally?
The process of doing the movie was very difficult, because it’s a very emotional story. In general, when I do a movie, at some point, when I start doing the grading, at the end of post-production, after I’ve watched the movie 100 times, I’m desensitized to it and just concentrate on technical details. For this one, I cried every time I heard Hind’s voice. There was so much emotional weight there.

I’m not sure how to put this, but from a personal point of view, I just felt I had to do something. So that I wasn’t complicit. I have no political power. I’m not an activist. All I have is this one tool that I have mastered a little bit, cinema. At least, with this film, I wasn’t silenced.