India, June 21 -- At a pivotal moment in Schindler's List (1993), director Steven Spielberg introduces colour to his black-and-white film. As Nazi troops storm the Krakow ghetto, Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) notices a little girl in a red coat. It isn't the bright red of Nazi symbols. Nor is it the colour of blood. It is a shade that speaks of life, innocence. There are many stories told of little girls in red coats during the Holocaust. Some, like Roma Ligocka, survived. (Her biography is titled Girl in the Red Coat). Many didn't. By showing a red coat in a later scene, on a cart heaped with dead bodies, Spielberg chooses to make the victims the beating heart of Schindler's List. In a different film set in a different era, another little girl serves as a symbol of slaughtered innocence. She isn't a skilfully placed motif in a larger narrative. Five-year-old Hind Rajab and her final hours are the entire story. Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025), out in theatres this week, recreates in excruciating detail what unfolded after the humanitarian organisation Palestine Red Crescent Society got a call from her on their helpline. The first responder, Omar (played by Motaz Malhees), worked out her location. An ambulance was eight minutes away. But distance and time in a war zone are measured in loops of bureaucracy. Minutes turned to hours, punctuated by more calls from the terrified child. The Voice of Hind Rajab is a work of docufiction in that the fictionalised sections are set in the Red Crescent office (below). The recordings of Hind's voice are real. "My family, they're all dead," she says. She talks about how she is scared of the dark. Over and over, she begs for help. She is trapped in a car and still under fire. The relatives who were taking her along as they fled Gaza have died. It is January 2024. The fictionalised sections are grounded in the realities of Gaza: The absurd tragedy of an ambulance stalled for hours, the targeting of children and medical personnel (two paramedics were killed while trying to rescue Rajab), the helplessness of humanitarian workers, are all lived experiences. Ben Hania blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction to remind us that we are watching a re-enactment, not a figment of someone's imagination. The phone in Hind Rajab's hand eventually went silent. The aid workers lost contact with the ambulance crew. The bodies were recovered 12 days later. A five-year-old girl, her three cousins, an uncle, an aunt, and the two men who tried to rescue her....