Ghorbankarimi, Maryam (2026) Voicing the Unseen : Visibility, Testimony, and Mediated Presence in Hind Under Siege and The Voice of Hind Rajab. In: The NECS 2026 Conference (European Network for Cinema and Media Studies): In/Visible, 2026-06-18 - 2026-06-27, Université Paul-Valéry Montpellier.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
This paper examines two 2025 films, Hind Under Siege (short, dir. Naji Salameh) and The Voice of Hind Rajab (feature docudrama, dir. Kaouther Ben Hania), as distinct yet interrelated cinematic responses to the mediated visibility of civilian life under siege. Drawing on theories of cinematic voice, indexicality, and ethical spectatorship, the paper approaches both films through their formal negotiation of presence, mediation, and audibility under conditions of extreme precarity. Both films are about the killing of six-year-old Hind Rajab in Gaza, yet they adopt different formal strategies to negotiate voice, presence, and ethical representation. Hind Under Siege begins by introducing Hind as a child, establishing her everyday presence, subjectivity, and vulnerability, before the narrative shifts as she becomes trapped during the siege. As communication deteriorates, the film foregrounds Hind’s interactions with Red Crescent workers, using telephone exchanges to structure the unfolding crisis. The short moves from embodied visibility to mediated audibility, gradually displacing the image of the child with the emotional and logistical labour of humanitarian responders attempting to act across distance, delay, and institutional constraint. By contrast, The Voice of Hind Rajab centres Hind’s recorded voice as both testimony and trace. Drawing on original audio material, the film positions voice as the primary site of witnessing, transforming sound into evidence while raising ethical questions about repetition, circulation, and spectatorship. Rather than reconstructing events visually, the docudrama insists on the irreducibility of voice as a marker of life, fear, and agency, even in the absence of the body. Read together, these films invite a formal analysis grounded in theories of cinematic voice, indexicality, and ethical spectatorship. Drawing on debates around acousmatic sound, recorded testimony, and the limits of visual representation, the paper argues that both works displace the cinematic index from image to voice, foregrounding audibility as a fragile yet insistent marker of presence. In doing so, Hind Under Siege and The Voice of Hind Rajab articulate a mode of witnessing that resists visual consumption, insisting instead on listening as an ethical act. The films thus propose a cinema in which voice becomes both evidence and encounter, reframing how civilian life under siege can be made perceptible without being rendered visible.