“The Voice of Hind Rajab”: The most talked-about film of 2025 to resonate loudly at the 31st Athens International Film Festival

Events like the one depicted in the film now occur with terrifying frequency, almost hourly, amid the ongoing genocide in Gaza, where the Israeli military indiscriminately executes civilians, including women and young children. Yet director Kaouther Ben Hania knows that one single incident is enough. How can one remain emotionally unmoved in the face of the cries for help from a six-year-old girl, trapped inside a bullet-riddled car, hiding among the corpses of her murdered relatives, alone as danger looms ever closer? And how can one not share in the anguish of both this child and the handful of Red Cross volunteers desperately trying, via telephone, to comfort her and to secure her immediate rescue?

Using the authentic audio recording—the real voice of young Hind Rajab—the filmmaker dramatizes the volunteers’ struggle to keep her company and reassure her, all while fighting back their own tears as they confront the excruciating delays in sending help. 

What Ben Hania achieves, without resorting to news footage or any explicit portrayal of violence, is the capture of the unseen, the unspeakable, and the unbearably real. She gradually constructs the horror in the viewers’ imagination, letting them complete the full and traumatic picture themselves. The audience is left devastated when the tragic outcome of the story allows for nothing less.

The Voice of Hind Rajab inevitably provokes anger, outrage, and shock. It avoids sentimentality, instead presenting the events exactly as they happened, with the utmost authenticity. In a reality that surpasses even the darkest cinematic script in sheer horror, this choice becomes the film’s meaning itself. Because how can one truly represent absolute barbarity on screen? How can one capture human cruelty in images? How can one remain composed in the face of a small, innocent child destined to spend what may be her last hours consumed by fear and anguish? How can any of this be understood? And how can it ever be forgiven?

Kaouther Ben Hania doesn’t provide answers. All she can do is ask the questions.

Screening details:
The film will be shown on Sunday, October 5th at 21:30 at CINOBO OPERA 1. The screening will be introduced by representatives of the Filmmakers for Palestine Greece network. Distribution in Greece has been secured by Cinobo.