“The Voice of Hind Rajab” to Open Doha Film Festival
Kaouther Ben Hania’s harrowing Gaza drama The Voice of Hind Rajab will be the opening film for the inaugural Doha Film Festival (DFF) this November, the Doha Film Institute announced.
A project supported by the DFI’s grants programme, the film reconstructs the killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab, who was struck while trapped inside a car with family members as they tried to flee Gaza City in early 2024. Ben Hania mixes real emergency-call recordings with scripted performances to recreate the terrifying sequence when Hind was pinned under military fire and Gaza’s emergency services scrambled to help.
Fatma Hassan Alremiahi, DFI CEO and festival director, framed the selection as a deliberate choice to “honour truth — fragile, heartbreaking, and urgent,” saying Hind’s trembling voice “speaks to every one of us.” She called the film an example of cinema’s power to amplify the voices of Palestinians and to spotlight the bravery of the unsung first responders who tried to save a child.
The DFF — an expansion of the DFI’s decade-long Ajyal festival that traditionally skewed to youth and family programming — will run November 20–28 and debuts with a bigger international slate and a new competition offering $300,000 in prizes.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival in early September and prompted a record-length standing ovation of 23 minutes and 40 seconds. High-profile actors Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara attended the Venice premiere and, alongside Ben Hania and the cast, are credited as executive producers — they joined the project days before the festival debut, together with producers Brad Pitt and Alfonso Cuarón.
The Voice of Hind Rajab is also Tunisia’s official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 98th Academy Awards.
Ben Hania, one of Tunisia’s most prominent directors, trained at the Ecole des Arts et du Cinéma and Paris’s La Fémis. She first drew notice with early works like Challat Tunes and Zeinab Hates The Snow. Her 2020 film The Man Who Sold His Skin became Tunisia’s first ever Oscar nominee; her more recent Four Daughters (2023) won the L’Œil d’or at Cannes and picked up an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary Feature.
The film’s launch in Doha comes amid intense international scrutiny of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which began after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks that the article reports killed about 1,200 people in Israel and resulted in 251 hostages. The ensuing operation has, according to the piece, killed at least 64,000 people in Gaza and pushed much of its population into homelessness and severe humanitarian crisis.
The DFI’s announcement followed a recent Israeli strike on Hamas leaders meeting in Doha — an attack that drew global outrage and public criticism from U.S. President Donald Trump.
By centering Hind’s recorded pleas and the desperate human effort to save her, Ben Hania’s film aims not just to document a single tragedy but to give a human face to the wider suffering and resilience of civilians caught in the conflict.
