Motaz Malhees in The Voice of Hind Rajab

Almost no film has devastated me as much as Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab. In an age of numbing doom-scrolling, we may be unprepared for the impact when a single story is given the thoughtful, shattering treatment by an empathetic filmmaker. That story made headlines: a 6-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind, called the Red Crescent emergency center in Ramallah in January 2024 begging for help because a tank was shooting at her family’s car. Recently been nominated at the Oscars for Four Daughters and The Man Who Sold His Skin, Ben Hania sought permission from Hind’s mother and secured the rights to the 70-minutes of audio recordings from that fateful day. The film intensifies the line between fiction and reality, as Ben Hania plays clips of Hind’s actual voice across a black screen while visually recreating a dramatized version of the events from the point of view of Red Crescent volunteer workers. The Voice of Hind Rajab stands alongside brave and insightful features about the Palestinian condition released in the US this year, such as Iranian-French filmmaker Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk, about photojournalist Fatma Hassouna; two riveting historical dramas, All That’s Left of You by Cherien Dabis, and Annemarie Jacir’s Palestine 36; and Mahdi Fleifel’s Greece-set odyssey To a Land Unknown.
I sat down with Ben Hania in a hotel in LA the day after the film screened at the UN for an emotion-forward conversation as she braved through a toothache. The film, which is Tunisia’s submission to the Academy Awards in the international feature race, will be released by Willa in theaters in the US on December 17. Our conversation below has been edited for clarity.
Filmmaker: Can you talk about working with your producers Nadim Cheikhrouha [The Man Who Sold His Skin], Odessa Rae [Navalny] and James Wilson [The Zone of Interest] on this? What were their different roles and contributions as producers?
Ben Hania: Nadim’s been my producer for more than 10 years. We were finishing the Oscar campaign for Four Daughters and about to enter pre-production of another movie, [then] I heard the voice of Hind Rajab. I stopped the other project; I told Nadim, “I can’t do it. There is something more urgent and more important to bear witness.” He was with me from the beginning. We started working. I called [Hind Rajab’s] mother [Wesam Hamada]. We got the whole recording of the conversation from the Red Crescent. Nadim talked with them. We did the contract with them to get the rights, then met Odessa, whom we knew when we were doing the promotion of Four Daughters. She was very excited and talked to Jim, so they came on board after.
We always finance our movies [via] Nadim. It’s [a combination of] public money and private money, but mainly public governmental money. For this film, we knew that we will not ask for governmental money. It would take too long and we don’t want to wait. So, it was about finding private money, a task divided between the three of them. Odessa had experience with financing with private money from America. Jim brought Channel Four.
Filmmaker: Do you know if there were other people trying to get the rights to this story?
Ben Hania: I don’t know. [The Red Crescent] never mentioned it. Luckily enough, they shared the recording with me and trusted me. I was talking to someone in the Red Crescent who knew my work and had seen my previous movies. He was—how to say?— the cultural counselor of the Red Crescent and working in the Ministry of Culture of Palestine. He was a moviegoer, in way.

Filmmaker: When you met Wesam Hamada, Hind’s mother, was it in person or over Zoom?
Ben Hania: No, in the beginning she was in Gaza, so I couldn’t meet her [in person]. I met her two weeks ago in Doha for the first time. It was so moving. We were at the Doha Film Festival, which opened with our movie. They did something wonderful, which is that they invited me, the cast and crew and the four real Red Crescent employees [based on whom the fictional characters in the film were created].
Filmmaker: Wow, that’s special! Was that your first time meeting the Red Crescent employees?
Ben Hania: Yes, exactly, so it was very moving. Actually, Hind’s mother gave the opening night speech—you can watch it on my Instagram—about her pain, and how she wants to transform this pain and all the love she is receiving into something bigger.
Filmmaker: Do you know if Hind’s mother had seen your previous work before she gave you the rights?
Ben Hania: No, I don’t think she had seen my work. We didn’t talk about this. We had a conversation. She told me she doesn’t want her daughter to be forgotten. She told me, “When we were in Gaza, since every Gazan is leaving a tragedy, we don’t have time to console each other. So, when you called me and were consoling me, it was very important.” What is fascinating is that she can’t see the movie. She doesn’t want to. She can’t even hear the recording. It’s too painful for her. I wanted to show her the movie. So, we showed the movie to her brother. She’s very close to her brother, who could tell [her that] the movie is great. We did four or five screenings with Q&As in Doha. In every Q&A she arrived at the end, when the credits rolled, to meet the audience. For her, meeting people is like sharing the grief. She told me, “It gives me a lot of courage. It’s like a funeral of my daughter, but on a big scale, so for me it’s very important.”
Filmmaker: In the beginning of the film, when Omar Alqam [played by Motaz Malhees] gets the first call from Hind’s cousin Layan Hamadeh, then he hears shooting in the background and the call drops, you focus on his face for a long time. That’s a strong choice. That’s when I felt I’m being pulled into the film. Can you talk about that choice and if it was something you had considered at the script stage or an idea that came about on set?

Ben Hania: I talked a lot with the real person, Omar, who told me, “When I heard the death, I was so shocked, I didn’t move.” This is something he told me and Motaz also. We wanted to be faithful to this moment where he said, “I was blank.” And I love close-ups, the Bergman way of filming faces. For me, the faces of the actors are worth a million words.
Filmmaker: You were working with a lot of constraints. The final film, before the end credits, is 85 minutes. The total recorded audio you obtained was 70 minutes, and we don’t hear all of it in the movie. The duration of the events at Red Crescent in the Ramallah call center was five hours, from when the first call came in at 2:35pm local time to when Hind’s voice dropped at 7:30pm. I imagine it must have been challenging to balance the dramatized aspect with the actors and using the real audio. Can you talk about that process?
Ben Hania: I come from documentary cinema where I don’t have a lot of budget, where you have a lot of constraints. So, I learned how to love the constraints, because inside the constraints I can become more creative. When everything is possible, you can get lost. So, when I decided to tell the story from the Red Crescent point of view, for me, I was sitting in this office. You have the reality of the things: the call, the [duration], I couldn’t change it. I found those constraints great, because they obliged me to be faithful to their hero point of view. They are working in impossible conditions. Their role is to save lives and they are doing everything to save life and paying a heavy price, losing a lot of colleagues—not only Yusuf al Zeino and Ahmed al Madhoun, the two paramedics who went to save Hind and were bombed, but before and after this incident, they lost 54.
Filmmaker: Of course hearing the audio for the first time must have been super emotional, but even during the writing process, while you were working through the constraints, you keep hearing the words again. How emotional were you in different parts of the writing process?
Ben Hania: From the beginning, when I received the recording, it was so hard to listen. It’s 70 minutes. I listened to it for days. But at the same time, I wanted to put all this anger and sadness in the movie. And after, I had to share this audio with the team. I remember, on the set it was like a funeral every day. It was very emotional, not only for the actors who are hearing Hind’s voice in their ears, but also for the DP, for everybody in the crew. It wasn’t like a classical shooting where I have a schedule and have to respect it, or I need to be efficient, ask a lot of things from the actors, do several takes, ask for a specific emotion. No, it’s not the movie for this. It was the movie where we had the most long breaks to hug each other. The actors weren’t performing; they were living the moment, as if they were the real [dispatchers] receiving the call. I couldn’t tell them, “Let’s do another take.” We shot almost like a documentary. If I had a boom in the frame, normally I would say “Cut, let’s start again.” I couldn’t, because the actors were so emotionally engaged. But with all those emotions, we felt like we were doing something important. Before starting work on this movie I was glued to the news, following what is happening in Gaza and asking myself, “What does it mean to tell stories when the unthinkable is happening? Is it trivial?” The four actors were depressed. They are Palestinian and seeing the killing. So, when we gathered around The Voice of Hind Rajab, for them it was like a gift. Finally we’d do something meaningful, tell a story from our inside.
Filmmaker: Regarding the fictional parts, is my guess correct that the conflict between Omar and Mahdi is the one you had dramatize the most compared to everything else?
Ben Hania: There were some real elements. I had the recording with their voices, but needed to know [more], so they told me a lot of events, and I picked the event that for me has a meaning in the story. I wasn’t there to do word by word what they said, but they told me some stuff that I tried to inject into the movie. So, it’s a dramatization based on what they told me.

Filmmaker: What I enjoyed, to the extent that you can enjoy, was the little scene towards the end, right before they got the green light, when Mahdi and Omar were on different sides of the bathroom stall playing video games. Is that something you thought of or is it based on what they told you?
Ben Hania: They told me. Omar is a huge player, and for him it was a way to stop thinking, to shift his focus from frustration and anger.
Filmmaker: Did you have to make any difficult decisions to exclude some of the real audio of Hind’s voice in the film? Did you find, for example, that some of it wasn’t working in the edit?
Ben Hania: No, I used most of it. The parts I didn’t use, she’s repeating the same thing, which is normal.
Filmmaker: In one of your interviews, you said that in this film you’re not blurring as much as “intensifying” the lines between reality and fiction, which I thought was a great word. At around the 25-minute mark, you partially freeze-frame on the actors playing Omar and Rana, and for the first time, we’re hearing the real voices of dispatchers Omar Alqam and Rana Hassan Faqih. Initially the film tells the audience that the audio of Hind is real and the events are fictional, but that is the first time you give us the juxtaposition of the real voices of the Red Crescent employees with the images of the actors. How did you decide you wanted to put it there, at the 25-minute mark?
Ben Hania: As I told you, I wasn’t filming a lot of takes. At that moment, when Omar and Rana realize that Hind is not alone in the car but is surrounded by dead bodies, the actors were so emotional. So, I didn’t have this moment of their exchange with Hind. I told myself, “Maybe it’s better that at this moment we stop acting and go for the actor listening to the real voice of their character. The contract with the audience is that they are actors. At some point we know that they are actors. So, at some point, let’s put the actor in the situation of listening, because they are the double, not the original.” So, we have the burst of reality here, with this [realization of] the situation of Hind, and emotional moment.
Filmmaker: Did you decide that on-set or in the script-writing stage?

Ben Hania: I put some passage in the script, I don’t remember exactly. I think it came also quickly in the editing.
Filmmaker: The second device that is so powerful happens later in the film when Nisreen, the counselor played by Clara Khoury, gets involved in the action and all the actors are huddled in Mahdi’s office. We see a hand holding a phone with the actual video footage of the real Nisreen Jeries Qawas over the shot of Clara Khoury. That’s the other really powerful juxtaposition, which in fact reminded me of the usage of the hand in Sepideh Farsi’s film, Put Your Soul on My Hand and Walk. How did you decide on this idea?
Ben Hania: Ah, I haven’t seen [Sepideh’s] film. It’s on my list. The Red Crescent sent me the archive of the videos linked to that day. They sent me this recording, and I needed to use it because it’s an incredible moment. Their colleagues are bombed, but they want to be sure if they are still alive, so it’s very intense and horrible. What happened to the ambulance is, I would say, evil. They gave the green light and the Red Crescent respected the regulation of the occupation, and [the paramedics] were [still] bombed. So for me, I needed to give proof that it’s real, because people don’t believe you [laughs briefly] when you say that they [the Red Crescent] respected all the rules and get bombed. People say, “You lie,” or “You exaggerate.” We live in this world of denial. Palestinians giving proof is not enough for them. They film their death, they give proof, and they’re suspected of doing something wrong to deserve this death, which is a very tragic dehumanization of the Palestinians. It’s horrible. So I told myself, “I’ll put this archive here to say it’s true. It’s not an American thriller.” This scene was like my door to go to the archival element, which is the ambulance and car.
Filmmaker: And it’s at this moment when I realized how close is the resemblance between Clara Khoury and Nisreen, and Amer Hlehel and Mahdi. How much did you think about this resemblance when casting Clara and Amer?
Ben Hania: I think about it a lot. I was lucky enough to find [these actors]. Even in their temperament, [they resemble each other]. For example, Motaz Malhees has the same temperament as Omar. He’s explosive, he’s fiery, he’s outspoken. At Doha he told me that he felt he was watching himself on the screen, in a way.
Filmmaker: Regarding the production design, I really liked the glass doors of the office. You can see Omar talking to Hind, and Mahdi is in the glass office behind him wearing his red sweater. How did you work with production designer Bassem Marzouk to design that office? Is it similar to the actual office in Ramallah?
Ben Hania: Yes, they have glass doors. It’s an open space, so we needed to find an open space. Bassem just sent me this photo of this place. It’s a reduction of a magazine. I found it really interesting. I gave Bassem the photos of the Red Crescent office so he can reproduce the elements, the maps, the logo. We tried to reproduce their offices. For the costume, since I had this video, I reproduced the same costume for the actors playing the real characters. Only one thing: in the video, Nisreen is wearing a purple “pull” [sweater] and a purple écharpe [scarf], and I don’t like purple. “I told myself, maybe in the color grading I’ll change it and make it blue.” The purple is not in the in the movie. But when I was showing the movie during editing, I got some weird feedback, like “Why is Mahdi the same in the video, and not Nisreen?” They thought the real life Mahdi is the same as the actor. So, I told myself I will not change the color [of their clothing], I’ll keep it different so people can see that they look alike but they are not the same.

Filmmaker: At any point, did you consider including the visual perspective of the other offices, like the Ministry of Health and the Red Cross that the Red Crescent characters were interacting with?
Ben Hania: You know, you consider everything. But you feel that it’s not right, you know? As you said, we are in the perspective of the offices of the Red Crescent, but the sound is bringing another image and another place and another geography, which is the car and Gaza and the tank. We have this already in the sound. It’s not a one-location movie because the sound has another location. So, it’s richer than what it looks like.
Filmmaker: After 9/11, in the US, there was so many movies made about the event. For example, there are two movies about the United Airlines flight 93 event. In the previous decade we had so many documentaries about the Syrian war. Do you think another movie will be made about Hind, and what is your hope for those movies and what do wish not to happen in those movies?
Ben Hania: I mean, why not? There are already two short movies made on Hind’s story. Her story should be told, and told again. You know, there are so many movies on Anne Frank. Every two years, there’s a new film about Anne Frank, so why not [about Hind]? Unfortunately, it’s not the only story in Gaza. You have so many tragic stories.
Filmmaker: Would you give any advice to those filmmakers about what not to do, or about the ethics?
Ben Hania: No, I don’t give advice. I think it’s so pretentious. Just ask the family. That’s the most important thing. Explain to them what you want to do.