We often describe certain challenging or button-pushing films as hard to watch; fewer are categorized as hard to listen to. In “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” the voice in question is a small one, belonging to a young girl alone and in unconscionable peril, high and breathless with fear and confusion. But it cuts through Kaouther Ben Hania’s film with piercing clarity, largely because, in contrast to a surrounding chorus of frantic adult voices, it isn’t performed. Rather, it’s a real-life recording of the last words ever spoken by Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian child killed on Jan. 29, 2024, after her family’s car was shelled by Israeli forces during their invasion of the Gaza Strip. In her final hours, the girl repeatedly phoned call-center volunteers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society, pleading for a rescue vehicle that never made it to her.
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Making that horrifying 70-minute audio file the heart and spine of her film, Ben Hania baldly confronts her audience with the real-time fate of one of more than 18,000 children killed so far in an ongoing genocide. “The Voice of Hind Rajab” brooks no political debate on the matter. But it’s likely to spur disagreement on other fronts, owing to a bold docufiction conceit that viewers acquainted with the Tunisian director’s previous work, including her Oscar-nominated hybrid doc “Four Daughters,” might see coming.
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Rajab’s shattering half of her dialogue with the Red Crescent workers is presented in the film nearly in full, but integrated into a heated dramatization of the call-center conflict surrounding her case. Actors speak and react to Rajab’s own desperate voice, while the film, set wholly within the Red Crescent’s beigely neutral offices, conjures a fraught ticking-clock atmosphere as precious minutes of inaction pass by. With Rajab seen only via archival photos, the film shares in the volunteers’ frustration at their distance from her, and audiences surely will too.
As such, “The Voice of Hind Rajab” proves quite unavoidably devastating. The original audio footage carries a brutal emotional wallop in any context, and there’s value in making a cinema audience captive to it, unable to pause or stop or avert our ears. Less certain, however, is what is gained by making this aural artifact the impetus of a fictionalized work incorporating elements of both melodrama and high-stakes, single-location thriller in the vein of Gustav Möller’s “The Guilty.”
Emotions are writ large and loud in Ben Hania’s script, as Red Crescent workers weep for the young girl at the end of the line, and furiously argue among each other about the morally right course of action to take, versus the strictures of protocol. But none of the feeling engendered by this written material compares to the sheer impact of the source recording. The film’s drama risks trivializing its documentary core rather than enhancing it.
Shooting in widescreen, DP Juan Sarmiento G.’s camera snakes around the cramped desks and glass dividing walls of the call center, striking an early visual note of claustrophobia that will soon be ramped up by the events at hand. Calls come in thick and fast from various Gaza residents trapped or under attack, or from relatives unsure of their loved ones’ fate — and this audio, too, is taken from the Red Crescent archives, setting up an immediately authentic atmosphere of on-edge panic.
Young, impassioned volunteer Omar (Mataz Malhees) first answers the call from Rajab, who’s hiding from IDF soldiers in the wreckage of her car, surrounded by the dead bodies of her uncle, aunt and four cousins. Omar’s so stricken by her plight that he’s unable to do much to calm her, and as his gentle-natured colleague Rana (Saja Kilani) takes over the call, he turns to stoic supervisor Mahdi (Amer Hlehel) to hasten the assignment of a rescue team.
But ambulances can only be commanded in a certain order, on a certain route, and the green light in Rajab’s case is slow to be given by the authorities above their heads. As we gaze over digital aerial maps of the destroyed city, and follow onscreen cursors of rescue vehicles inching agonizingly through ruined, rubble-blocked streets, all while the voice on the phone increasingly tightens with terror, “The Voice of Hind Rajab” turns queasily into a hopeless kind of tension exercise — a race against time that we already know is lost.
Some viewers will be fully immersed in the horror and despair of the moment, while others may have greater misgivings regarding Ben Hania’s layering of tearjerker tactics over material that hardly requires extra emotional amplification. Her filmmaking choices, from fevered editing rhythms to an urgently swelling score, rarely favor understatement, while the performances benefit from a heartfelt, in-the-moment intensity, but little modulation or finesse.
This generally broad, collar-grabbing approach certainly makes for a direct and compelling polemic, landing in the midst of a crisis that lower-key campaigning so far hasn’t done much to solve. You can see why a host of big-name industry activists, including Jonathan Glazer, Joaquin Phoenix and Alfonso Cuaron, have attached their names as executive producers to Ben Hania’s film ahead of its Venice competition premiere, anticipating what will doubtless be a prominent international arthouse release. If “The Voice of Hind Rajab” opens one hitherto blinkered eye, or ear, to the atrocities in Gaza, it will have done its job. But it’s a blunt and discomfiting instrument.
