‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ movie review: Kaouther Ben Hania’s damning indictment of spectatorship speaks for itself

Perhaps the greatest compliment one can pay The Voice of Hind Rajab is that the CBFC briefly entertained the horrifying possibility that audiences might accidentally learn something from the film. Kaouther Ben Hania’s Venice-winning docudrama reconstructs the final hours of Hind Rajab, the six-year-old Palestinian girl who spent January 29, 2024, trapped inside a car in Gaza City’s Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood after Israeli fire killed six members of her family. For hours, she remained on the phone with Palestine Red Crescent dispatchers, surrounded by the bodies of her relatives, before she and the two paramedics sent to reach her were brutally killed by Israeli fire.

Faced with this, our national custodians of public morality allegedly concluded that its release would “break up the India-Israel relationship”, which is a fascinating standard to apply, considering the film’s first and only offence appears to be documenting reality. Contrary to the growing chorus of Islamophobic trolls and assorted connoisseurs of genocide denial dismissing the film as Arab agitprop online, perhaps 355 bullets fired into a six-year-old proved a little too irrefutable for even one especially prolific purveyor of cinematic slopaganda (and fellow CBFC board member) to bury beneath another avalanche of bigoted WhatsApp-university revisionism. 

Ben Hania, the Tunisian filmmaker whose previous features The Man Who Sold His Skin and Four Daughters both secured Academy Award nominations, approaches this material through an austere formal framework. Rather than reconstructing the attack itself, she confines almost the entire film to the Palestine Red Crescent emergency call centre in Ramallah, a city in the occupied West Bank located roughly fifty miles from where Hind was trapped. Motaz Malhees plays dispatcher Omar Alqam, the real operator who spent hours speaking with Hind, while Saja Kilani, Amer Hlehel and Clara Khoury portray the colleagues attempting to organise a rescue mission through a labyrinth of military approvals and communications bottlenecks. 

The film maps the excruciating administrative machinery governing survival in Gaza, explaining how the Palestine Red Crescent could not simply dispatch the nearest ambulance to a terrified child trapped less than ten minutes away, but instead had to navigate a chain of approvals involving the Palestinian Ministry of Health, the International Committee of the Red Cross and the IDF, before a vehicle could legally enter the area. The otherwise eight-minute rescue gradually metastasises into an hours-long exercise in procedural paralysis, with the dispatchers trapped in the crippling position of begging the same military apparatus that shredded Hind’s family car for permission to rescue its sole surviving occupant.

A still from ‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’
| Photo Credit:
Mime Films

The terrified voice we hear throughout the film belongs to Hind herself. The emergency recordings are real, preserved from the calls she made while trapped among the bodies of her relatives. Every time she speaks, we are reminded that there is no screenwriter imagining these words and no actor performing them. And Ben Hania further collapses the boundary between reconstruction and testimony by incorporating footage of the actual Red Crescent personnel involved in the rescue effort. The docufiction hybrid effect is difficult to shake because it denies all comforts of reminding ourselves that this is only a movie.

There is, admittedly, a reckless (and disconcerting) kind of brilliance in what Ben Hania is doing here that will undoubtedly raise eyebrows. Is it exploitative to build a feature around the final hours of a murdered child? Is it in bad taste to dramatically reconstruct one of the most horrifying audio recordings to emerge from the genocide in Gaza? Perhaps. It isn’t difficult to understand why those questions are worth asking. But far too much time and effort has been spent on filmmakers congratulating themselves for telling us stories about fictional suffering and fictional injustice to recognise the rarity of somebody forcing us to confront one of the most defining atrocities of our time. 

I remain instinctively sceptical whenever filmmakers venture this close to capturing real-world suffering, because the distance between art and exploitation has now become more alarmingly porous than most artists care to admit. Yet the equally uncomfortable truth is that the internet generation has been subjected to such a relentless conveyor belt of algorithmically curated atrocity that only the most extraordinary horrors still possess the power to puncture the numbness. No sane person should ever become comfortable hearing a frightened little girl trapped among the bodies of her family, and Ben Hania makes sure of that. That tension is what makes The Voice of Hind Rajab such a ruthlessly effective piece of filmmaking. 

As of yesterday, the commander of the 52nd Battalion of Israel’s 401st Armored Brigade, the same battalion repeatedly linked by investigators to Hind’s killing, was himself killed during operations in southern. I would be lying if I said the image of one more participant in this sickening machinery of slaughter being EKIA’d did not provide some indulgent sense of satisfaction. But nothing can quite compensate for the fact that one of the most comprehensively documented atrocities of the twenty-first century has been systematically trivialised, endlessly what-abouted, denied in plain sight and even enthusiastically justified whenever denial became untenable. May the very existence of The Voice of Hind Rajab preserve for posterity this grotesque abdication of human conscience.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is currently running in theatres