‘THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB’ REACHES AMSTERDAM
words by VERONICA TLAPANCO SZABÓ
Undeniably one of the most vital films circulating right now, The Voice of Hind Rajab, directed by Kaouther Ben Hania, will premiere this Wednesday at Amsterdam’s Eye Film Institute. The documentary style film retraces the events of January 29, 2024, when Red Crescent volunteers received an emergency call from a six-year-old girl trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading to be rescued. As responders tried to keep her on the line, they exhaust every option to send an ambulance but without clearance from the Israeli army, no vehicle is allowed through. They wait. Hours pass. And the permission never comes. Her name was Hind Rajab.
The horror remains unfathomable, and the helplessness all too familiar. The narrative sets one fragile thing at the absolute center: the voice of a child. All the phone recordings are real, the voice you hear is Hind’s. There are no slogans, no grand ideological theatrics, just a six-year-old begging to live. In that moment, every myth, every prophecy, every “bigger picture” is exposed as painfully small, nothing can swallow a moment like that.
“At the heart of this film is something very simple, and very hard to live with. I cannot accept a world where a child calls for help and no one comes. That pain, that failure, belongs to all of us… This story is about our shared responsibility… and how the silence of the world is part of the violence.”
Premiering at the Venice Film Festival, the film unfolds as an intense huis clos, using maps, photos, sketches, and on-screen fragments to build pressure among characters who are all trying, in their own way, to do the right thing. It points to the inertia and dysfunction of bureaucratic systems, but more directly it reveals the structures Israel has put in place to continue decimating the local Palestinian population. It is a portrait of people with the best intentions trapped inside a hierarchy designed to immobilise them.
Following the screening, a panel will be moderated by Clarice M.D. Gargard, a journalist, writer, filmmaker, a voice where art and justice meet. She’ll be joined by Carice van Houten, one of the Netherlands’ most celebrated actors (and an outspoken advocate for human rights and climate justice); Sinan Can, a journalist and documentary filmmaker who has spent years telling stories from war zones, centring those left unseen; and Kefah Allush, a storyteller whose devotion to narrative and language infuses everything from discussions of death to analyses of the Middle East. The film is set to be released across the Netherlands on 22 January 2026. While a film cannot end a war, it can force us to confront what is human, and what is brutality masquerading as righteousness. The Voice of Hind Rajab speaks for itself: free Palestine, now and forever.
