Melis AlemdarWhen Palestinian actor Motaz Mahlees was cast as Omar A Alqam, a paramedic with the Palestinian Red Crescent, he says the project stopped being an exercise in craft and instead became a duty.
The weight of the role hit him immediately – he remembers getting goosebumps the moment he learned he had been selected for the role.
“It wasn’t acting anymore,” he tells TRT World. “It felt like [I was] living the story.”
The feeling only deepened on set, where the production used Hind’s actual voice recordings rather than a reenactment.
For Mahlees, on the right in the photo above, hearing her pleading voice was among the most unsettling experiences of his 16-year career.
“It was really, really hard to listen to her voice. It's a child, five years old, begging for safety, to be rescued, to be safe.”
Written, directed, and edited by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, The Voice of Hind Rajab is a docudrama that reconstructs the events of January 29, 2024, when Hind Rajab was trapped in a car in Gaza, under fire from Israeli tanks.
It highlights recordings from the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, which spent hours trying to reassure Rajab as she lay trapped in a car, where Israeli fire had killed her aunt, uncle, and three cousins, and another cousin who survived initially but then died as well, as she and her family tried to evacuate Gaza.
“Please come to me, please come. I am scared,” she is heard sobbing in the recordings, with the sound of bullets being fired in the background.
Israeli forces then killed the girl, along with the two ambulance workers who had rushed to the scene to rescue her.
Ben Hania built the film around the original audio recordings of those calls; much of the film’s power comes from layering her voice over a dramatised account of the dispatchers and medics who tried to rescue her.
The film premiered at the 82nd Venice International Film Festival in early September 2025, where it received an extraordinary reception, a 23-minute standing ovation, setting the tone for immediate international attention.
The festival later awarded Ben Hania the Silver Lion, and the film swept several collateral awards at Venice.
Film critics on the Rotten Tomatoes site are all unanimous but one, in their assessment of the film's raw power. It has a 96 percent approval rating, with reviewers describing the film as “searing” and “unflinching”.
The project attracted notable industry support. Executive producers include Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Alfonso Cuaron, Rooney Mara, and Jonathan Glazer; while production partners include Film4 and Plan B, Brad Pitt’s production company.
The raw nature of the film, coupled with the Venice spotlight, has raised hopes for a broad international release, with Tunisia selecting the film as its entry for the ‘Best International Feature Film’ category at next year’s 98th Academy Awards.
Mahlees tells TRT World that the role left him emotionally shaken. “It's literally heartbreaking reading the script.”
“I was having lots of dreams, nightmares. And even when I'm walking in the streets, sometimes I hear her voice in my head. It's not something I can control.”
For him, the film is a call to action. Mahlees and other cast members have used press opportunities to urge governments to end the genocide, to cut military support to Israel, impose sanctions, and to push for legal accountability.
‘Enough’
At the news conference in Venice, one of the actors, Saja Kilani, playing first responder Rana Hassan Faqih, read a statement on behalf of the cast and crew.
“Hind’s story carries the weight of an entire people; it is not hers alone. Her voice is one amongst 19,000 children who lost their lives in Gaza in the last two years alone,” she said.
Referring to the helplessness the Red Crescent workers felt as they anxiously waited for Israeli authorities to allow for an ambulance to seek Hind Rajab, Kilani asked, “How have we let a child beg for life and go unheard?”
“Let Hind Rajab’s voice echo in every theatre, let it remind you of the silence the world has built around Gaza, let it name the genocide that silence protects and let it pierce the word: enough,” Kilani concluded.
The urgency expressed at Venice has been echoed off-screen. In May, on what would have been Hind’s seventh birthday, the Hind Rajab Foundation, a non-profit organisation, announced it had filed a war crimes complaint against Israeli army members that it says are directly responsible for her death.
As calls for accountability grow louder, Mahlees reflects on his own life between Palestine and exile. Born and brought up in Jenin in the occupied West Bank and now living in London for the past four years, says he feels safe there.
“Nobody stops me. Nobody breaks down my door with the M16 (assault rifle) above my head, asking me for my ID while I'm sleeping. Nobody strips me naked to search me for nothing,” he says, comparing his time in the UK with Palestine under Israeli oppression.
He says he appreciates protesters demonstrating against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, but that it’s not enough to end the onslaught.
“You need to put real pressure on the governments because governments, if they decide to stop it, they will stop it. And that's the only way we know it.”
Earlier this year, Columbia University in New York expelled and suspended several students for their involvement in pro-Palestinian protests, including the occupation of Hamilton Hall in the spring.
The university stated that its Judicial Board had imposed penalties ranging from expulsion and temporary degree revocation to suspensions lasting several years.
The university did not reveal how many students were affected.
In April 2024, a group of antiwar protesters took over the historic Hamilton Hall on Columbia’s main campus, renaming it “Hind’s Hall” in honour of Hind Rajab.
Addressing nations that support Israel, Mahlees says sanctions could be the solution. “And do not send weapons. Don't come and free me”, referring to the US tradition of “liberating” countries, such as Iraq and Afghanistan, that didn’t end well for the residents.
He says Israel’s allies also need to stop arming them with ”Apaches, F-16s, all these disgusting machines to kill other people. That's what we need. Stop doing that."
Calling his experience filming Hind’s story “a once-in-a-lifetime experience”, Mahlees says, “I've never been in a project like that, and I don't know if I will be later in the future”.
