The Voice of Hind Rajab

Few films are as devastating as Kaouther Ben Hania’s Oscar-nominated and highly acclaimed The Voice of Hind Rajab — and that is partly because few stories are as tragic and gut-wrenching as this one. The film was held up by India’s censor board before finally releasing here, despite containing no onscreen violence — zero, zilch.

There is a certain uneasiness inside you after you finish watching the Voice of Hind Rajab. The voice of five-year-old Hind Rajab, or Hanood as she was called fondly, continues to echo in your ears hours after the film is over. Directed by Kaouther Ben Henia, the docu-feature blends reality and fiction to deliver a heartwrenching account of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab and her urgent pleas on calls to Red Crescent volunteers to rescue her after her family was ambushed by the Israeli forces in January 2024. The Voice Of Hind Rajab is a film that is a testament to the times we live in. And while the semi-fictional semi-real film makes you uncomfortable, angry, emotional and ultimately numb, it is an important watch.

“The tank is next to me.” “They are shooting at me.” “Come get me. I’m all on my own.” Few films begin with lines this freighted with irrevocability. The Voice of Hind Rajab confronts us with the real voice of a five-year-old girl whose fate is already known, stripping cinema of suspense and replacing it with something far more devastating: certainty. If urgency in the narrative holds it together as a piece of cinema, it is inevitability that makes director Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama an impossibly heartbreaking affair. The film is set inside the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s call centre in Ramallah on January 29, 2024. As the war between Israel and Palestine rages on, employees operate in a heightened emotional state, trained to respond to civilian SOS calls amid constant crisis. Omar (Motaz Malhees), Rana (Saja Kilani), Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), and Nisrine (Clara Khoury), the fictional leads, along with the late Hind Rajab’s real voice on a phone call, have guts of steel, but their hearts ache too, as do those of the viewers.

The most wrenching performance in The Voice of Hind Rajab was never performed. At the centre of Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama sits a real recording: the shaking voice of a five-year-old girl captured on the last afternoon of her life. Everything assembled around it is staged. The friction between the two — actors straining toward a child who is already beyond their reach — is what makes the film almost unbearable. The facts are a matter of record. On 29 January 2024, five-year-old Hind Rajab was trapped in a car in Gaza City, hemmed in by the bodies of her aunt, uncle and four cousins, after Israeli fire tore through the vehicle as the family tried to flee. She was the only one left alive. For hours, she stayed on the line with volunteers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society, asking, over and over, for someone to come for her. The ambulance that was finally dispatched never reached her; its two paramedics were killed, too. Hind was found dead days later. The recordings of those calls, released afterwards, went around the world. Ben Hania built her film around them.

“Come get me. They’re shooting!”

Long after seeing The Voice of Hind Rajab, the five-year-old’s voice still echoed in my ears. It became impossible to unhear her confused, scared and desperate cry for help. Kaouther Ben Hania, who was compelled to direct the film after chancing upon Rajab’s voice while scrolling through social media, is standing on an ethical minefield here. A fictional film – which splices real-life recordings between the Red Crescent volunteers and Rajab into itself – it could’ve resulted in a jarring, self-conscious film. But to the makers’ credit the hybrid form of the film feels almost seamless while recreating the crushing disappointment of the war room – where a handful of volunteers spend an entire day trying to arrange an ambulance to rescue the child. This could have been a sentimental, exploitative film, but it’s, again, Ben Hania’s ability to hold back at the right time that made The Voice of Hind Rajab one of the most essential films of last year. The film is magical in the way it fuses truthfulness and creative license.

Some films come carrying so much weight that they become hard to bear. Some films become testaments to their time. The Voice of Hind Rajab is one that does both: it lets us in on the agony of a small child left alone in the back of a car, her family members murdered, calling for help; it also asks us to bear witness. Director Kaouther Ben Hania first heard the clip in which a five-year-old girl is heard sobbing, saying she is afraid of the dark, asking for help. The voice belonged to Hind Rajab who was travelling with her aunts, uncles and cousin in the Gaza strip when the car was strafed by Israeli forces. Everyone in the car is dead, the cousin is grievously injured: we learn that the latter dies too, leaving the terrified Hind hiding as best as she could behind the backseat.