The Voice of Hind Rajab

Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab won the Silver Lion at Venice 2025, and was shortlisted for European Film Awards Best Film. Ben Hania, the Tunisian director of The Man Who Sold His Skin (Oscar-nominated) and Four Daughters (Oscar-nominated), made the film in response to the recorded last phone calls of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed in Gaza City in January 2024 while trapped in a car with her dead family members and waiting for ambulances that were also destroyed in the Israeli strike that killed her.

The film constructs its narrative around the actual recorded audio of Hind's calls to the Palestine Red Crescent dispatch in Ramallah, calls that lasted hours, with the dispatchers attempting to keep her conscious while ambulances tried, repeatedly, to reach her. Ben Hania pairs the recordings with reconstructed dramatic scenes inside the dispatch office, filmed in a register that refuses both melodrama and abstraction. Hind's voice, on the actual recordings, anchors every scene.

The film became one of the most discussed works of 2025, both for its formal achievement and for its function as a piece of legal-ethical witness. The Venice Silver Lion was widely understood as the first major European festival prize awarded explicitly for a work centring on Gaza casualties; the response within Israeli and pro-Israel critical circles was sharp. Ben Hania has said in interviews that her project was to ensure the recordings are not abstracted into statistics.

Why it's an Editor's Pick: The most morally serious film of 2025, and a work whose existence is itself a form of political witness. A film that uses cinema to keep a child's voice in the historical record.