The Voice of Hind Rajab
For her seventh feature, Kaouther Ben Hania turns her attention to Gaza and delivers a devastating indictment of the insanity of war.
Hind Rajab.
Image courtesy of Altitude Film Distribution.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
The voice of Hind Rajab is the star of the film. That is, the real voice of a six-year-old Palestinian girl preserved on an audio file. Around Hind’s repeated calls of “save me”, writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania re-enacts the scene at an emergency call centre where four volunteers attempt to disentangle the red tape preventing an ambulance to come to Hind’s rescue. Hind’s pathetic pleas for help, sometimes disrupted by gunfire, are the dramatic backbone of the film, to which real actors react with mounting frustration and anxiety. On 29 January, 2024, the Red Crescent Society received a call from a little girl in Tel al-Hawa, Gaza, who explained that she was in a car with some sleeping relatives, while being fired at from a tank. It takes all the patience and resources of Omar (Motaz Malhees) and Rana (Saja Kilani) to establish that Hind is in a car surrounded by the corpses of her aunt, uncle and four cousins and that she is very, very frightened. The best that Omar and Rana can do is to keep her spirits up – and to recite passages of the Koran – while the rest of the team attempts to get permission for the authorities to help.
The Voice of Hind Rajab is extraordinary on a number of levels. It is not only one of the most moving war films ever made, but it manages to be so without the sight of a single weapon. It is also set entirely in one office, just featuring four actors – and the voice of Hind Rajab. War is often just a configuration of complications. Here, it is the necessary protocol – the ‘coordination’ – needed in order to send help to save a little girl being shot at by Israeli troops. Because of Kaouther Ben Hania’s restraint, and the innate humanity of her protagonists, less is definitely a case of more. All is quiet at the beginning of the day, a deceptive calm as Omar and his colleagues answer routine calls 52 miles from the front line of an unimaginable hell zone. Hania, the Tunisian filmmaker whose 2020 drama The Man Who Sold His Skin was nominated for an Oscar in the international feature category, isn’t making any political point, she is making a humanitarian one. Her latest film, which has also been nominated for an Oscar in the same category, uses the form of docudrama in its truest sense, mixing the real with the re-enacted. The effect is both wholly convincing and completely numbing.
Cast: Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Clara Khoury, Amer Hlehel, and the voice of Hind Rajab.
Dir Kaouther Ben Hania, Pro Nadim Cheikhrouha, Odessa Rae and James Wilson, Ex Pro Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Jonathan Glazer, Alfonso Cuaron, Elizabeth Woodward, Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner, Guillaume Rambourg, Sarah Rambourg, Sawsan Asfari, Ramez Sousou, Tiziana Sousou, Jemima Khan, Amed Khan, Jorie Graham, Geralyn Dreyfous, Mohannad Malas, Frank Giustra, Farhana Bhula, Ali Jaafar, Samar Akrouk, Hana Al-Omair, Hamza Ali, Badie Ali, Karim Ahmad, Michella Rivera-Gravage, Francesco Melzi D'Eril, Gabriele Moratti, Stephanie Olson, Erik Nari Olson and Sabine Getty Screenplay Kaouther Ben Hania, Ph Juan Sarmiento G, Pro Des Bessem Marzouk, Ed Qutaiba Barhamji, Maxime Mathis and Kaouther Ben Hania, Music Amine Bouhafa, Costumes Khadija Zeggaï.
Mime Films/Tanit Films/Film4/MBC Studios/Watermelon Pictures/Plan B Entertainment/Sunnyland Film-Altitude Film Distribution.
88 mins. Tunisia/France/UK/USA. 2025. US Rel: 17 December 2025. UK Rel: 16 January 2026. Cert. 15.
