"The Voice of Hind Rajab," Shortlisted for Oscar, Uses Audio of 6-Year-Old Girl Killed in Gaza

Two years ago this month, the world was gripped by a series of shocking recordings of a 6-year-old girl in Gaza pleading for help as she sat trapped in a car riddled with bullets alongside the bodies of her cousins, aunt and uncle, who had just been killed by Israeli forces as the family attempted to flee the Israeli ground invasion of Gaza City. Emergency responders with the Palestine Red Crescent Society attempted to secure safe passage to rescue the child, an elementary school student named Hind Rajab, but Israeli forces also targeted and destroyed an ambulance as it arrived on the scene, killing medical workers Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun, before firing again at the family’s car, killing Rajab.

“When you hear her voice, you can’t unhear it,” says the award-winning Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, whose new Oscar-shortlisted film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, incorporates recordings of Rajab’s emergency calls to depict responders’ race-against-the-clock attempt to save her — and the ultimate failure of the international community to prevent her violent death. Ben Hania says the film, a hybrid of documentary and drama, is an effort to “honor [Rajab’s] voice, but also to tell this incredible story of those heroes trying to save lives in impossible conditions.”