The Voice of Hind Rajab, a Tunisian film by director Kaouther Ben Hania nominated Thursday for an Academy Award in the “international feature” category, was among four submissions dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — a roster that stands out because each country is limited to a single entry.
Three of these made the shortlist, from which nominees are chosen. Ben Hania’s film, a telling of the tragic effort to save a 6-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab, from the bullet-ridden car where she was trapped amid the bodies of her family, made the final cut.
“This nomination belongs first to Hind. To her voice. To what should never have happened and yet did. It belongs to everyone who believed that cinema can still be a space for truth, care, and responsibility,” Ben Hania said in a statement Thursday. “Among these beautiful films from around the world, I’m deeply honored that Hind’s voice is there. Not as a symbol. As history. Thank you to the Academy for listening.”
Her invocation of Hind’s voice is literal: The film, which navigates a blurred line between documentary and drama, is layered atop the real audio recording of Hind’s desperate call to Red Crescent dispatchers as they race to send rescuers to her aid. Two paramedics — Yousef Zaino and Ahmad Al-Madhoun — died trying to reach her. Hind also died, in the car where she spent her final hours.
A Washington Post investigation, which Ben Hania consulted in making the film, found that Israeli forces were operating in the area at the time despite Israeli claims otherwise, that gunfire consistent with Israeli weapons could be heard on Hind’s call and that the ambulance’s destruction was consistent with the use of a round fired by Israeli tanks.
The Oscar winners will be announced during the 98th Academy Awards on March 15.
Ben Hania said she found it “beautiful” that her film was among a group of submissions telling stories about Palestinians. The three that were shortlisted, all by female directors, look at different stages of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, from 1936 to the present, she pointed out in an interview.
Palestine 36, the Palestinian entry, “is about the beginning” of the conflict in British Palestine. All That’s Left of You, the Jordanian entry, follows a family through generations of strife. “And you have my movie, it’s about Gaza right now,” she said.
Israel’s submission, The Sea, also tells a story of Palestinian life, set in the West Bank and Israel just before the Gaza war, but did not make the shortlist.
Here are the four films submitted for “best international feature” offering visions of the of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
The Voice of Hind Rajab
The Voice of Hind Rajab isn’t meant to be entertaining, Ben Hania said. It is a call to action.
The film follows in agonizing detail as Hind, amid the bodies of her uncle, aunt and cousins, speaks with her mother and Red Crescent workers coordinating a rescue attempt, to no avail.
Hind’s bullet-riddled body and the burned-out ambulance that tried to reach her were discovered 12 days later.
Hind and her cousins were among the tens of thousands of Palestinian children killed in the war in Gaza — the most dangerous place in the world to be a child, UNICEF said last year.
“Hind’s story is about a child crying out, ‘Save me.’ And the real question is, how have we let a child beg for life?” said Saja Kilani, who plays a Red Crescent station supervisor, reading from a statement following the movie’s debut at the Venice Film Festival in September.
When Ben Hania first reached out to Hind’s mother, Wissam Hamada, for her blessing to use the child’s voice in the film, she responded, “I want justice for my daughter, and if your movie can help, please do it,” Ben Hania recalled.
“Nothing will bring her daughter [back] again, but the fact that her daughter is remembered and her pain is recognized, I think it brings to her some courage,” she said.
All That’s Left of You
The Jordanian film All That’s Left of You, a multigenerational family drama written and directed by Palestinian-American Cherien Dabis, tells a story of life under Israeli occupation.
Dabis was set to begin filming in Jaffa, Israel, when the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attack and Israel’s response in Gaza temporarily derailed the production, Screen International reported.
The film opens in 1988, during the early days of the Palestinian uprising known as the first intifada. After Israeli soldiers shoot Noor, a teenage boy living in the occupied West Bank, during a protest, his mother reflects on how the violence has have wracked the family for generations.
She begins in Jaffa in 1948 with what Palestinians remember as the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe”: the exodus of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians, many uprooted by Israeli operations, amid Israel’s declaration of independence.
“I’m here to tell you who is my son,” says Hanan, Noor’s mother. “But for you to understand, I must tell you what happened to his grandfather.”
Palestine 36
The Palestinian shortlist entry is a historical epic, integrating some archival footage, about the three-year Palestinian Arab revolt against British colonial rule and the fight for independence — released at a moment of heightened interest in examining, reexamining and searching for echoes of the present in the region’s deeply contested 20th-century history. Directed by Palestinian Annemarie Jacir, the film follows Yusuf, a young man from a small village in Mandatory Palestine who works in Jerusalem.
Beginning in 1936, amid rising tensions between Palestinians and the British Empire that spiraled into a revolt against colonial rule amid an influx of Jewish migration driven by Nazi persecution, the film charts the uprising and crackdown that followed — events that shaped the trajectories of Zionism and Palestinian nationalism, often overshadowed in telling by all that followed.
Although in an entirely different mode than The Voice of Hind Rajab, critics noted integration of documentary-like elements in both films.
The Sea
Filmed in the summer of 2023, months before the start of the Israel-Gaza war, The Sea depicts life under Israeli occupation through the eyes of a 12-year-old Palestinian boy.
Though the film, Israel’s submission, did not make the Oscar shortlist, it won acclaim and drew controversy in Israel, including over its portrayal of Israeli soldiers, with actors alluding to the human toll of the war in Gaza in acceptance speeches.
Khaled, who is from the occupied West Bank, a landlocked territory, looks forward to visiting the Mediterranean for the first time, by way of a school field trip across the border. He is turned away at an Israeli military checkpoint after the soldiers declare his travel permit invalid.
The Arabic-language film by a Jewish Israeli director, with a largely Palestinian Israeli cast, follows Khaled as he ventures out on his own, determined to see the sea. Meanwhile, Ribhi, an undocumented laborer who works in Israel, realizes his son has gone missing and sets out on a desperate mission to find him.
Khaled does makes it to the sea — though not in the way he envisioned.
The film swept the Ophir Awards — Israel’s Oscars equivalent — in September, taking home five prizes, including for the sought-after Best Picture award, making it the country’s automatic Oscars entry and drawing backlash from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. The country’s Minister of Culture and Sports, Miki Zohar, announced that he would withdraw state funding for the award moving forward.
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