For decades, François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows has stood as cinema’s definitive portrait of an unhappy childhood. Kaouther Ben Hania’s devastating new film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, may finally dislodge it. Centered on the real-life story of a five-year-old Palestinian girl, the film renders Truffaut’s adolescent anguish almost quaint by comparison.

Built around real audio recordings, The Voice of Hind Rajab is a haunting docudrama that focuses on the final phone calls of a young Palestinian girl, using her recorded voice to bear witness to civilian suffering and the human cost of war. It has earned the Academy Award nomination for Best International Feature Film. Writer-director Ben Hania’s tour de force has creatively encapsulated the gobsmacking misery that has been unleashed since October 8, 2023, upon the children of Gaza, where “a staggering 64,000 children have reportedly been killed or maimed . . . including at least 1,000 babies,” according to an October 8, 2025, United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report. Hind Rajab has since become a symbol for all of Palestine’s suffering children. In April 2024, months before Ben Hania’s film, the little girl galvanized Columbia University students to occupy a building and rename it “Hind’s Hall” in her honor.

This is the third Oscar the Tunisia-born Ben Hania has been up for; the auteur’s 2020 The Man Who Sold His Skin was nominated for Best International Feature Film and her 2023 Four Daughters was nommed in the Best Documentary Feature category. The Voice of Hind Rajab’s executive producers include Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón, and Jonathan Glazer, who directed 2023’s The Zone of Interest, which won the Best International Feature Film Oscar that year. Interestingly, James Wilson, the producer of that movie about Auschwitz, also produced The Voice of Hind Rajab, along with Odessa Rae, who coproduced 2023’s Best Documentary Feature Academy Award winner, Navalny.