During my journalism, when I decided, “No, thank you, news journalism is not for me” and “Yes please to the softer world film journalism, “I did not imagine that film review would ever involves taking artistic assessment of documentary evidence of war crimes. Nor would I do it in a global climate where the contested war criminals, far from held to account, are held to account, continues the same way.
There is no distance between what Kouther Ben Hania depicts and now. It would be devastating enough about the atrocities in ”Hind Rajab’s voice“ only Available in hyper-recent live memory, but no, the Israeli violence against Palestinians has escalated since the day of its attitude: January 29, 2024. Looking at this movie feels like RSVPING for a funeral of someone who is still alive. It is also an elegance for a child whose vitality is heartbathing, because we know it does not have a chance.
The story of 6-year-old Hind Rajab made headlines in January 2024 after Palestine Red Crescent released sounds of her distressed emergency call, made from a gas station in Tel al-Hawa in southern Gaza. Even establishment news channels, generally reluctant to show humanity in individual Palestinians, could not resist this Heart scrapes of an innocent in danger. Her sweet, shaking voice and said, “I’m afraid, come and get myself,” traveled around the world. She begging to be rescued from a car full of the fresh corpses, when the night and IDF closed on her.
For his last movie, Tunisian Director Kaouther Ben Hania Has organized the entire conversation and treated it with respect, horror and sadness, which gives it room to play in its entirety without attempt to visualize, animate or reconstruct what is happening on the ground for Hind. Instead, when we hear Hind’s voice, the sound waves fill the screen and in the corner: 240129.wav. At all levels, this is the right choice. The words are enough. The fear in her little voice when she explains her situation in showers tells everything. Any extra accessories would land somewhere between Glib and Holy.
Most of the film’s visual sequences are reconstructions of the experiences of Palestine Red Crescent staff who worked at their West Bank’s office at that time. The news clip did not convey that there were many calls from Hind over a period of hours, as the increasingly desperate workers tried to balance the task of trying to organize an ambulance to gather her (which they had to secure progress of Israeli approval) by calming a child in a situation for which there is no insurance.
As the reconstruction goes: On the Palestine Red Crescent Emergency Call Center in Ramallah, Omar (Motaz Malhees) plays rock, paper, scissors when a call comes in from Germany. A man calls for relatives stuck in a car in the Tel al-Hawa area that was evacuated by IDF that morning. When the first voice we hear is connected is a woman. In the middle of screams and the sound of bullets she is killed. Omar’s office is characterized by untouched normality – with its glass walls and desktop computers, its phones and headsets.
The contrast between this and an aural document about human life that is sniffed out is a shock that never struggles. Hania does not waste time or the drum superficial plot, she just starts the movie. Within minutes we hear Hind’s voice.
All phone calls used in the film are the real sound, and the air is sucked from the screen as they play. The main task of the actors is to feel the way we know and hear how it sounds like being a whole person persecuting for violent death. Omar is no longer the man who played rock, paper, scissors; He’s on a knife edge. He is us and we are him. We are also his colleagues Rana (Saja Kilani), Mahdi (Amer Hlehel) and Nisrine (Clara Khoury), touched to do everything to answer Hind Rajab’s voice in such a way that she is ok again.
The first 20 to 30 minutes of the film are a devastating immersion in the psyche of a child captured in a nightmare. The voice of the Hind is lively; She has not been boring with shock. She’s real! She lives! She wants more than something to be saved and reunited with her mother. For starters, the Hind describes the bodies of the relatives around her as “sleeping.” The adults in the call center share the stage together while trying to keep the horror out of their voices. Rana forces herself to create a soothing, family tone. They need Hind to stay in the car, to leave it increases the likelihood of her being shot. How do you make that pitch a 6-year-old? The Red Crescent staff handles death daily but they have not grown hard and Hind’s voice has regretted Rana and Omar.
A scraping breaks out between Omar and his manager Mahdi. Omar is desperate after sending an ambulance. Mahdi knows what will happen if they send an ambulance without ensuring the Israeli condition through the Ministry of Health or the British Red Cross. He shows Omar a gallery with Martyred Ambulance driver. Omar screams, “people as you are the reason we are busy,” but he doesn’t really mean it. They are just tired of being helpless. How have we created a world where a 6-year-old Palestinian child captured in a car with his dead relatives does not qualify as an emergency?
The theater is something Hammy, which is a relief, because it gives the audience a chance to remember themselves and remember that it is just a movie (Right?). Hania gives us a breathing room. She does not use sentimentality as a stick to beat the audience into numbness. The film is made with the collaboration with China and provides operational context so that we have heard from Hind in and around, develop a sense of space. There are TV screens for rolling news and live maps with green dots showing where ambulances are-this will later become a source of jump-to-hope. There is a wall of photos of calls that died on the line. It is a clean and modern headquarters similar to offices all over the world where most of us have worked at one time or another.
Omar traces how long it has been since Hind is first called by writing numbers in the marker pen on Mahdi’s glass office. Something strange happens in the brain when you hear a dead child’s living voice; You start to think about it perhaps She can be saved. If Hind is both himself and emblematic for other 6-year-old Palestinian girls in Gaza, this is not a crazy thought.
To be clear, this is a movie specifically about her. This is her elegant, her memorial, her voice, her face.
Hania is wise for the fact that she does not have to pronounce macro -political statements, as the lawless barbarism in IDF’s IDF’s lawless barbarism. By pushing the opposite of this, the audience in China does the only thing they can, which is to try to keep in touch with Hind, how bleak things become. In this regard, they reflect all over the world and testify to a genocide that continues to grind. They can’t make it stop and they can’t hang the phone.
The interaction between raw sounds and physical reconstructions is handled skillfully and discreetly. Hania has form in metafiction, but this is a step up even from Quesily gripping “four daughters.” The seriousness of the subject has tightened her narrative instincts, so that she has at the same time cleared space for the sound to be the heart in everything, while ensuring that there is enough narrative structure to land with maximum impact and clarity.
The filmmaker is sensitive when it comes to building narrative drama for, although there are ticking-clock procedure elements, the source of narrative tensions is-in the end-a source of Israel’s most clear condemnation. Mahdi and Omar go a lot to secure an ambulance through “proper channels.” They do everything right. And still …
All of these elements are set, just to be cleared away again when the film returns to the center of gravity. Violence is not the highlight of Kaouther Ben Hania’s movie. Make no mistakes, it is there and pictures from crime sites show enough to make your imagination cave on yourself.
But this soulful memorial wants us to look back through the eyes of those who loved her. And not just hind – everyone for the film’s purpose whose life was brutally cut short. From the photography wall to the pictures that clearly blink when Omar calls paramedics, Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun, this film is sophisticated to give way to unsophisticated feelings: sadness and love, which under the conditions of the genocide is the same. “The Voice of Hind Rajab” is an invitation to a general grief.
Rating: A-
“The Voice of Hind Rajab” premiered at 2025 Venice Film festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
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