Kaouther Ben Hania’s film The Voice of Hind Rajab reconstructs the events of January 29th, 2024, when employees at the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Ramallah received a series of emergency calls from Hind Rajab, a young Palestinian child trapped in a car under fire in Gaza.
Told from the perspective of the first responders frantically attempting to co-ordinate her rescue, the film unfolds largely in nail-biting real time, adopting the structure and pacing of a procedural thriller.
The film’s spine is its use of the audio recordings of Hind’s calls. Ben Hania presents these recordings, scratches and all, without visual re-enactment, instead reducing the screen to sound waves and a stark audio filename.
The effect is bracing and sometimes emotionally overwhelming. At the film’s premiere in Venice and at subsequent festival screenings, sobbing was typical in the auditorium. Hind’s frightened, insistent voice conveys the reality of her situation with a force that requires no amplification or artifice. These moments confront the audience directly.
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Around this material Ben Hania builds dramatised reconstructions among the emergency services, focusing on staff members as they juggle bureaucratic constraints, emotional exhaustion and the urgency of a child pleading for help.
Shot with hand-held camerawork and tight close-ups, the film recalls the forensic intensity of Paul Greengrass’s Bourne films. Pained performances flag the strain of humanitarian labour under siege conditions.
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The fast turnaround on this ripped-from-the-headlines project occasionally tells. The script comes a little unstuck when outlining the procedural obstacles that delayed aid, including the requirement for Israeli authorisation to dispatch an ambulance. Scenes of confrontation between staff members can feel contrived.
But Ben Hania has experience with hybrid documentary. Her Oscar-nominated Four Daughters similarly married verisimilitude and stylised re-enactments. She carefully sidesteps ethical questions about the use of performance alongside archival evidence with a clear-headed chronicle of a tragedy and of wider Palestinian suffering.
In cinemas from Friday, January 16th
