Kaouther Ben Hania, director of The Voice of Hind Rajab.Mathilde Marc/Supplied
Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania was promoting her Oscar-nominated feature Four Daughters when she first heard the voice of Hind Rajab – a five-year-old Palestinian girl whose desperate phone call for help, made while trapped in a car in Gaza City, was later released publicly after she and several relatives were killed by Israeli forces on Jan. 29, 2024.
When the harrowing call between the little girl – pleading for help next to her already-dead family members – and the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS) was made public, Ben Hania knew she had to do something to confront the overwhelming feeling of powerlessness it stirred in her.
In a recent interview over Zoom, the director reflects, “I thought maybe I can make a movie to share this feeling with the audience. Maybe the helplessness could become something else about the refusal to feel helpless.”
A giant portrait of 5-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab who was killed in Gaza in 2024, is unfurled in Barcelona in January, 2026.Nacho Doce/Reuters
Those instincts led Ben Hania to her documentary-narrative hybrid, The Voice of Hind Rajab, a Best International Feature nominee at this weekend’s Academy Awards to be handed out Sunday. In it, Ben Hania uses the real voice recordings of Hind Rajab’s call to the PRCS, and works with actors (including Saja Kilani and Motaz Malhees) to re-enact the PRCS staff’s desperate attempts to rescue Hind while trying to keep her engaged and at ease.
In a record- and boundary-breaking feat, this is Ben Hania’s third consecutive Oscar nomination, following Four Daughters (2023), and The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020). She is also the first Arab woman to direct three Oscar-nominated films across the Academy’s spotty history with women directors and Arab cinema. (After the Algerian-French filmmaker Rachid Bouchareb, she is only the second Arab filmmaker to receive as many nominations.)
Her accolades are richly earned, as Ben Hania has made deeply original movies on her own terms, confidently blending genres across fiction and non-fiction. “I come from a place where nobody was doing cinema,” Ben Hania remarks. “But what was familiar in my family is writing – it’s easier to have a pen and paper.”
A self-professed bookworm, Ben Hania first dreamt about being a novelist. But when she started experimenting with cinema, her priorities shifted. What remained important to her was using the language of film to find a way to portray her region’s complex realities with an insider’s perspective.
“When you see the history of Hollywood, and how the Muslim, Arab and Palestinians are portrayed in those movies, it’s not a wonderful image. It’s full of clichés,” she reflects. “When you don’t tell your own story, someone else will do it, but very badly,” she adds with a chuckle.
Her focus on hybrid storytelling emerged when Ben Hania encountered the limitations of both documentaries and narratives in conveying her vision. That realization drew her to watching mockumentaries in the early days of her career, including films such as Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap, Woody Allen’s Zelig, and Forgotten Silver, an early Peter Jackson film co-directed by Costa Botes.
“I love black humour and the irony of this incredible genre,” she says. “These films are shot in a documentary style but they are not reality, so you can push things. My first feature film [2014’s Le Challat de Tunis] was a mockumentary.”
The films of Abbas Kiarostami, particularly his 1990 masterwork Close-Up, were also big influences as she developed her own voice.
When she asked herself, “What is the best way to honour Hind Rajab’s story?” Ben Hania knew her film had to be both sensitively respectful (and therefore as accurate as possible), and emotionally powerful, with the ability to make the audience feel Hind Rajab’s plea in the present tense.
“She was alive when she was asking for help, so it couldn’t be an event that happened in the past. I had to engage the audience in the [real-time] journey of trying to save this little girl,” she explains.
Ben Hania arrives at the 98th Academy Awards Oscar nominees luncheon on Feb. 10.Jordan Strauss/The Associated Press
While the production took place in Tunisia, many of her actors had a chance to meet and work with the real people that they were portraying. To remain faithful to the recordings, they memorized their lines exactly, word for word.
During rehearsals, Ben Hania didn’t play Hind Rajab’s voice for them – those sessions were focused purely on learning the lines. It was only during the actual shoot that the little girl’s voice was introduced.
“I had to find a new way to direct the actors,” Ben Hania remembers. “I knew that I couldn’t ask them to do several takes to give me a variation of their emotions. So, when they speak in the movie, when they have the answer from Hind Rajab in their headset, that was the first time that they had this dialogue. And they weren’t performing, actually. It was their real emotion hearing the voice of this little girl. We shot in long takes mainly. And this method proved to be the most authentic. They are not faking their tears. It was real.”
The intensity of the subject also shaped the atmosphere on set. Every time there was a break, the cast and crew – many of them Palestinians – shared their own stories, reflecting on their relative privilege as artists with a voice.
“We had this feeling that we were doing something important,” Ben Hania recalls. “We had this motivation to put [our] anger into art, which was way better than any psychologist telling us how to handle ourselves.”
Recently, Ben Hania refused to accept an award in Berlin at the Cinema for Peace gala. Leaving her Most Valuable Film prize given to her for The Voice of Hind Rajab on the stage, she demanded international accountability for Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
Recalling the evening and explaining how accepting the award would have felt like complicity, “There were a lot of political decision makers at that gala who could have changed things,” she says.
In that spirit, she went onto delivering her remarks about her decision. “Tonight, I feel responsibility more than gratitude. What happened to Hind is not an exception. It’s a part of a genocide,” Ben Hania said at the event.
She continues, “They were gathered around something called peace. But there is a cognitive dissonance about what we mean by peace. The award was a recognition of my work. But at the same time, this recognition means they need the blessing of cinema [to tell this] big lie called: ‘we love peace.’”
Elsewhere, Ben Hania is encouraged by audience responses, with people telling her how The Voice of Hind Rajab changed their world view.
“While this film is telling a singular story, my idea was, ‘If you feel the pain for this little girl, multiply this feeling by 20,000 children. It’s something that no human heart can bear, no one movie can express. We have a lot of denial, which is very tiring. So that made me decide not to do a movie that explains, but makes you feel.”
If Ben Hania wins an Oscar on Sunday, she will become the first Arab woman director to receive an Academy Award. While she is cautious talking about that prospect, she still recognizes the significance of a win. “It would mean that the voice of this little girl is so strong, and it went till this moment where it can echo and echo and echo to make her memory last forever.”