The Voice of Hind Rajab, 2025.
Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania.
Starring Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Clara Khoury, and Amer Hlehel.
SYNOPSIS:
Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call. A 6-year old girl is trapped in a car under IDF fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. While trying to keep her on the line, they do everything they can to get an ambulance to her.
Critiquing a film such as The Voice of Hind Rajab is a tough assignment, but it’s a necessary one. There are thousands of tales born from this period of death and destruction. This is one. A painful one. But it’s emblematic of the innocence at the heart of this timeline we’re suffering through. A child who knew not why she died, much like many others on both sides of the divide, and it’s important that film as an artform remains a time capsule of the trauma.
The event in question is the murder of a five-year-old Palestinian girl who was targeted by the IDF during the invasion of the Gaza strip. Her calls to the Red Crescent emergency centre, surrounded by the corpses of her family whilst she cowered in a car riddled with 335 bullet holes became headline news. Filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s recreation of that day weaves her heartbreaking audio footage with a dramatisation of the behind-the-scenes attempts to try and get an ambulance to her location.
Similar to the way Paul Greengrass approached his depictions of tragedy, Voice has an immediacy to the shooting style that puts you front-and-centre of events. A free-roaming camera intrudes on what appears to be a day like any other day in the call centre, with colleagues messing about in-between picking up their headset, and managers clocking off to go home after a long shift at work. Making this feel like a normal work environment populated by relatable people goes a long way to accentuating the drama that’s to come and the backdrop against which this tale plays out.
When the call comes in you might expect the drama to shift to the scene, but Hania sensibly retains the single-location, knowing full well that the content of the recordings is enough to depict the horror of the Hind’s situation. She’s right, the voice messages are unavoidably distressing, not necessarily because of the intermittent gunfire or any graphic details, but because they are punctuation to the recognisible sounds of what’s simply a scared little girl.
Her words would be enough, but Voice painstakingly recreates the efforts the team went in an attempt to rescue her. The permissions required, waiting on red-tapes and green-lights, all underlines the helplessness of the emergency workers as they try to navigate a path to the scene of destruction. Each literal and metaphorical roadblock or unanswered call only makes Hind’s pleas for help all the more painful to endure.
The cast is minimal, but they’re all exemplary. Motaz Malhees and Saja Kilani are superb as Omar A. Alqam and Rana Hassan Faqih respectively. As the first responders to Hind’s call, they do a lot of the emotional heavy lifting outside of the real-life recordings, with both putting in exhaustive performances befitting the situation. Hania incorporates some smart but respectful techniques with which to underline the reality of the situation, such as occasional blurring of the actors voices with that of their counterparts, and a scene towards the end in which a mobile phone’s viewfinder contains actual footage of the team huddled around a phone listening to Hind’s final moments.
Kaouther Ben Hania’s film respectfully asks you not to look away at a time when the world has become desensitised to such events. Her film is an unflinching recreation of a one story that echoes a thousand others. The performances are powerful, the dramatisation impressive, but it’s the voice recordings of Hind and her final moments in this cruel world that should scar all who listen.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film ★ ★ ★ ★/ Movie ★ ★ ★ ★
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