We are used to seeing films about unchangeable histories. The kind that look back upon atrocities and ask us to question how we allowed such things to happen. It’s rare to watch a film about an atrocity as it’s happening. The Voice of Hind Rajab, by the Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, is one of those films. It’s a narrative story, “based on real events,” about real life violence, that blends elements of fact with re-enactments of reality to fill in what could not be documented visually.
Hind Rajab was a five-year-old girl who lived in Gaza City. On January 29 2024, as her family tried to flee following the arrival of the Israeli Ground Forces, their car was shelled, killing her uncle, aunt, and three of her cousins. Stuck inside and seeking help, her cousin Sarah called the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), a humanitarian organization that helps injured citizens in the Gaza Strip. As Sarah speaks to the call handlers, she’s shot dead. They call back minutes later, and it’s Hind who answers. For over three hours, the PRCS first responders talk with her as she’s confronted by gunfire and tanks. Despite liaising with the Red Cross and IDF forces, the PRCS ambulance that was promised safe passage to rescue her was ambushed just meters from her vehicle. Aid never reached her. Hind was found dead, killed by IDF shelling and gunfire, with the bodies of her family 12 days later.
Ben Hania’s film recreates those three hours in which the PRCS call handlers, Omar and Rana, were in contact with Hind. When the actors playing them—Motaz Malhees as Omar, Saja Kilani as Rana—are speaking to Hind in the film, their words are lifted verbatim from a transcript of the call. There is no actor playing Hind Rajab—her real voice speaks back to them.
Ben Hania’s work is subtle and heartbreaking—a masterful blending of documentary and cinema. She’s employed this technique before. Her Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters, about a Tunisian mother’s two eldest daughters being radicalized by ISIS and leaving for Syria, contrasts the actual younger sisters of the radicalized girls with actors who play them creating strange, docu-fictional reenactments. It’s a remarkable way of melding the real and the posed, the historic and the present that undergirds the film’s infallible power.
Another film premiering in competition at the Venice Film Festival this year, A House of Dynamite, also uses this hellish, clock-ticking technique to deal with a hypothetical nuclear bomb heading for American soil. But to watch The Voice of Hind Rajab is to witness the horror of our reality, and to sit in the feeling that Hind is not alone. She’s part of a statistic that will grow greater as you’re in the movie theater. The prevailing question as those credits roll: Why?
After being selected to play at the Venice Film Festival—where it received a 23-minute standing ovation from an emotional, charged audience—a slew of significant figures in Hollywood joined the project as executive producers. Jonathan Glazer, Brad Pitt, Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, and Alfonso Cuaron have put their names behind The Voice of Hind Rajab. With any luck, after its festival run, it will end up in theaters for wider audiences to see. The word “important” is used to the point of apathy in cinema, often to describe much lesser works.. This movie is not only important in the truest sense of the word; it’s a crushing masterpiece that will stitch itself into your soul after you watch it.