The Pulse of a Child: The Voice of Hind Rajab Against Forgetting

            Bandits with planes and Moors

came through the sky to kill children

and the blood of children ran through the streets…

Pablo Neruda (Explico Algunas Cosas)

At the 82nd Venice International Film Festival, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania unveiled The Voice of Hind Rajab (Sawt Hind Rajab, 2025 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt36943034/), an incredibly powerful work that merges political urgency with a humanist manifesto of empathy. The film takes as its subject the true story of Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian child trapped in a car in Gaza, whose final phone calls to humanitarian workers echo through the film. Ben Hania resists sensationalism: we never see Hind herself, only a few photographs. We do not witness explosions or battlefield imagery. Instead, the camera remains fixed within the offices of a humanitarian organization, where staff members receive and respond to Hind’s pleas. This restraint—the decision to let the child’s authentic voice carry the narrative—becomes the cornerstone of the film’s aesthetic and political force.

The choice to stage the action within the humanitarian office emphasizes not only the paralysis of aid in the face of overwhelming violence but also the structures of solidarity that still strive, however imperfectly, to resist destruction (the workers have to wait for confirmation from state agencies; every second counts for the child). The ensemble of actors who play the aid workers is exceptionally strong, imbuing each exchange with tension, grief, and urgency. As viewers, we share their impotence: they can speak to the child, they can document, they can try to act, but they cannot save her. This deliberate limitation turns the audience into witnesses, implicated in the same global indifference that allows genocide to unfold. To portray the siege of Gaza as “conflict” would be dishonest: as the film makes clear, this is not war in any conventional sense but a genocide against a trapped population.

For while the film is rooted in Gaza, it transcends any single geography. Hind’s voice joins a chorus of silenced testimonies from generations of Palestinians whose lives have been truncated by systemic dispossession and violence—a reality too often reduced to statistics or abstract notions of “conflict” in global discourse. With nearly half of Gaza’s population under 18, each act of violence destroys not only lives but futures. By centering Hind’s voice, Ben Hania underscores how political structures of domination manifest in the most intimate realm—the vulnerability of a single child. Her dream is not victory or revenge, but simply to live, to laugh, to play by the sea. Hind thus becomes emblematic of all innocent victims of war—not an exception, but the rule, the sound of life trapped within structures of domination. Watching the film feels like sitting on dynamite: the quiet room of aid workers is charged with unbearable tension, a sense that everything might explode at any moment. The effect is devastating.

Aesthetically, the film’s power lies in its radical minimalism. By restricting the camera to the humanitarian office, Ben Hania transforms absence into presence. The audience never sees the battlefield, only hears Hind’s trembling voice on the phone (visually represented on the screen as a cardiogram, metaphorically depicting life and its fragility)—an aesthetic choice that foregrounds sound over image, intimacy over spectacle. The confined office space mirrors the claustrophobia of Gaza itself, while the silence between words weighs as heavily as the dialogue. This formal restraint not only heightens the emotional intensity but also enacts an ethics of representation that preserves the dignity of the child’s final words. In resisting spectacle, the film counters what some call the “pornography of suffering,” insisting instead on attentive listening; not aestheticizing violence becomes an act of solidarity with its victims.

Ben Hania has described her film as an act of memory, a resistance against amnesia and indifference. In its refusal of neutrality, the film recalls the militant spirit of Third Cinema  for which works like The Hour of the Furnaces (La hora de los hornos, 1968) by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas or Sambizanga (1972) by Sarah Maldoror turned cinema into an urgent act of solidarity rather than spectacle. This articulation situates the work within a long lineage of political cinema: films that recognize their limits—unable to end wars or dismantle inequality—yet refuse silence, preserving memory and resisting erasure. As she shows, cinema does not possess the power to topple regimes, yet it can awaken audiences numbed by the saturation of violence in media. It can stir compassion and, equally crucial, anger. The challenge then, as the film implicitly asks, is how to channel this compassion and anger toward action.

The film resonates strongly with traditions of leftist cinema that refuse neutrality in the face of oppression. Ben Hania’s approach challenges viewers not merely to witness but to reckon with their own position in a global system that tolerates oppression. By focusing on a single voice—that of a young girl—Ben Hania avoids abstraction and statistics. Instead, she gives form to what the philosopher Walter Benjamin once called the duty to “brush history against the grain”: to amplify the silenced, to remember those whom official narratives prefer to forget. To watch the film, then, is to realize that Palestine is not a distant tragedy but a mirror held up to our global capacity for indifference—or solidarity. This ethical imperative runs throughout the film’s structure, and the film functions as both cinema and testimony.

In its closing movement, The Voice of Hind Rajab makes plain its dual nature: it is a deeply human story and at the same time a political manifesto. The film insists that empathy itself must be protected and mobilized, that solidarity is not optional but urgent. In a moment when authoritarianism and indifference grow across the globe, this film reminds us that art does not have to directly address politics to be political. As musician Jenny Beth (former singer of the band Savages) has noted, “Artists are here to open us, to make us feel more in touch with others and connected and empathetic.” That’s what art does. Ben Hania’s film embodies this truth.

The Voice of Hind Rajab may not end the violence in Gaza, but it does what cinema at its best can do: preserve memory, challenge indifference, and awaken empathy. It leaves us with a searing awareness that the future, though unwritten, depends on our willingness to feel, to act, and to stand in solidarity. Cinema, fragile though it may be, still has the capacity to resist forgetting and help ignite resistance. For those indifferent to the “pulsation” of a little girl, the film challenges our very sense of humanity and reminds us that compassion transcends politics, ideology, and borders. Ben Hania refuses neutrality: to listen to Hind is to take a side—not in geopolitical rhetoric, but in defense of life itself. In the Palestinian context, where entire families are erased, cinema becomes a fragile but necessary act of resistance against erasure. As the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda once wrote of the innocent blood flowing through the streets, The Voice of Hind Rajab insists that we, too, cannot avert our eyes. Remembering Hind is not only an act of mourning but an indictment of the conditions that made her death possible. At its Venice premiere, the film received a record 23-minute standing ovation. But applause must mean more than admiration: it must mean a rejection of neutrality. To act is to refuse erasure. To remember Hind is to commit to solidarity. In a world where words of love are spoken like currency, yet emptied of meaning, The Voice of Hind Rajab restores to us the weight of feeling. It reminds us that compassion is not a phrase but a pulse—fragile, urgent, and alive.

Alexander Gabelia
Edited by Robert Horton
© FIPRESCI 2025