The Voice of Hind Rajab
2025 · Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania
Original language: Arabic
- drama
- history
The story
January 29, 2024. Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call. A five-year old girl is trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. While trying to keep her on the line, they do everything they can to get an ambulance to her. Her name was Hind Rajab.
What it’s like
Confined and nearly documentary in feel, the look is the drab interior of a relief dispatch office: flat fluorescent light, cramped desks, headsets, glowing monitors, with the camera staying close to the people on the phones rather than the streets outside. The sound carries the experience. A small child's voice fills the room through a speaker, real recorded audio is woven against sparse music that mostly stays in the background, and long stretches of held silence leave only breath and the tick of a clock. The pacing is tight and real-time-feeling, and the emotional register sits somewhere between suspense and grief as a small group of workers struggles to keep a frightened girl talking and to hold their own composure. Intensity is high and emotionally brutal. Violence is mostly heard rather than shown, but the dread of a child in danger and its outcome land hard and do not soften. This is not gentle, and it is not for a relaxed evening. It suits viewers who want a sober, unflinching piece of witness cinema about the war in Gaza, and who can sit with grief and helplessness for the full runtime.
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