The film, “The Voice of Hind Rajab” by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania won recently the Silver Lion Award at the Venice Film Festival, the festival’s second highest award. It is also now nominated for the Golden Lion, the festival’s top prize.
The film, screened for the first time, shocked the audience so deeply that the hall erupted in nonstop applause for 23 minutes; not only for the cinematic art itself, but rather as a sign of bow to the human pain represented in the voice of a Palestinian child that the world failed to hear in time. A cry that has now been noticed through a film and an award, besides becoming a bleeding memory.
The film is based on a recorded conversation by phone between the five-year-old Palestinian child, Hind Rajab and a member of a relief team at the Palestinian Red Crescent Society in Gaza. Hind, who had been trapped in an intensely bullet-targeted vehicle and surrounded by the bodies of her family, was pleading for help.
While Hind was screaming out of fear, “take me away from here; I am scared; I am alone; no one is with me!”, the heavy bombing continued. The bullets that penetrated Hind’s tiny body were faster than the ambulances.
For five whole hours, Hind clung to life and held onto a fragile thread of hope before her voice was silenced. Twelve days later, her body was found still and frozen in terror in that same car. Next to her, was her uncle and other members of the family. They were all killed.
The film winning this prestigious award did not only bring joy to humanity but also caused a hysteria in Israel. Cultural institutions there launched a vicious campaign against the film, its director and funders attempting to hide the crime by burying its memory.
This heartbreaking story broadcasted live audio-visually with all its bloody details transcends time and geography. It brings back to memory the story of the young German Jewish girl, Anne Frank. Anne, who was barely twelve when she fled with her family from the Nazis to the Netherlands and spend four years of her life hiding in a small storage room before being arrested with her parents.
Anne wrote her diaries in which she described her fear, dreams, and the remains of hope that never came true. The texts were then published in a book translated into sixty-five languages. In 1959, the book was turned into a famous, worldwide known film which won several major awards, including the Oscar. It was supported and promoted by Zionist movements and institutions internationally until Anne Frank became a universal symbol of slaughtered innocence.
I watched “The Diary of Anne Frank” and read the book years ago. I also and visited the museum established by the Dutch government under her name in the heart of Amsterdam. I was deeply shocked. How could it be that tragedy reproduces another one under a different name and flag?! How does it happen that a victim of the past becomes so cruel in present?!
I noticed the horrifying similarity between the suffering, murder, and ethnic cleansing of Anne Frank and her family at the hands of the Nazi monster, on the one hand, and what Hind Rajab and her family endured by Anne’s descendants in Palestine, on the other hand!
It seems it is wrongly assumed that victims have a soft heart and are more sensitive toward the suffering of others, however, it appears that history repeats itself in other ways and under different flags. Victims commit crimes instead of becoming more aware of other people’s suffering. They could turn into merciless creatures motivated by revenge, as if the first human lesson is erased every time a child screams helplessly in the dark and no one answers. Hind screamed and Anne wrote, while the world remained silent, twice.
Abed Alkarim Ashour
08/09/2025
(Translated by Palestinian Stories)
