How a Gazan child’s desperate phone call inspired a must-see movie

The little girl s desperate pleas stopped Kaouther Ben Hania in her tracks. Ben Hania, the Tunisian filmmaker behind the Oscar nominated features...

The little girl’s desperate pleas stopped Kaouther Ben Hania in her tracks.

Ben Hania, the Tunisian filmmaker behind the Oscar-nominated features “The Man Who Sold His Skin” and “Four Daughters,” was at the airport scrolling through social media in February 2024 when she came across a snippet of 6-year-old Hind Rajab’s emergency call to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society from the month before. There had been an influx of increasingly cataclysmal news out of Gaza, and Ben Hania made efforts to stay as informed as possible, but Hind’s innocent voice devastated her anew.

“It haunted me,” Ben Hania said in December at the Hyatt Regency on Capitol Hill. “It was like she was asking me to help her.”

Hind had spoken with the emergency dispatchers in Ramallah from inside her uncle’s car roughly 50 miles away, where she hid underneath a seat, surrounded by the dead bodies of her uncle, aunt and four cousins. The family had been trying to flee Gaza City when Israeli soldiers opened fire on their vehicle at a gas station, killing everyone but Hind. (The Israel Defense Forces told The Washington Post in response to an April 2024 investigation that its forces were “not present near the vehicle or within the firing range” of the car but did not comment on two detailed timelines of the incident provided by Post journalists.)

While traveling to promote “Four Daughters,” a gripping meta-documentary about a Tunisian mother whose eldest two daughters are radicalized to join the Daesh fighters in Libya, “I was asking myself a lot of questions about what it means to be a filmmaker, and a storyteller, when reality is beyond what you can comprehend and imagine,” Ben Hania said. Hearing Hind’s voice clarified her mission to help audiences see the world from a new perspective, and to aid their efforts to become more involved citizens. She quickly embarked on “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” a new film following the Red Crescent workers who received Hind’s call.