The Voice of Hind Rajab [2025]

 On 29^th January 2024, Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl, was killed in Gaza by the Israeli Defence Forces. Six of her family members – uncle, aunt and four cousins – were earlier killed, leaving the little girl stranded, while two paramedics were also killed upon trying to rescue her. This massacre, which became a harrowing reminder of the ensuing genocide, and the desperate but ultimately futile rescue attempts by the Palestine Red Crescent Society from their West Bank headquarters, formed the subject of the deeply discomfiting docudrama The Voice of Hind Rajab. Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, in her previous work Four Daughters, had blended documentary and performative elements into a stunning hybrid film, and she went for a similarly bold formal gamble here. She set it entirely in the humanitarian organization’s office, featuring dramatization of the actual individuals involved in remotely leading the rescue efforts, and used the actual recordings of the little girl’s voice – helpless, confused, afraid and too young to fully comprehend this horrendous scenario – to lend authenticity to the proceedings. While the adults in the room – call centre worker Omar (Motaz Malhees); his supervisor Rana (Saja Kilani); Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), who’s responsible for coordinating with the authorities and paramedics; and Nisreen (Clara Khoury), who provides counselling to the traumatized employees – battle through the night, their emotionally fraught conversations shot in near-real-time – that portrayed the extreme psychological toll and bordered on histrionics – made for an unsettling contrast to the actual voice of the deceased kid. This counterbalancing between commentaries on the war crime and staged verisimilitude – and reducing the girl to just an anchoring voice – was an ethically fraught choice, even if it was a distressing watch.

Director: Kaouther Ben Hania

Genre: Drama/Docudrama/War

Language: Arabic

Country: Tunisia