![‘The Voice Of Hind Rajab’ Review: This Ripped From the Headlines Film About Gaza Will Rip Out Your Heart [Venice]](https://cdn.theplaylist.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/03233225/The-Voice-of-Hind-Rajab_Still_HERO.jpg "‘The Voice Of Hind Rajab’ Review: This Ripped From the Headlines Film About Gaza Will Rip Out Your Heart [Venice]")
Take out a thesaurus for any overused critical buzzword about political cinema – timely, urgent, necessary – and they all fail to capture the shattering impact of Kaouther Ben Hania’s “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” The film premieres into a world where developments have only grown worse for Gaza since the events it depicts on January 29, 2024. This docufictional work uses cinema to its fullest capacity to grant an even greater megaphone to the titular six-year-old Palestinian killed by Israeli forces.
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Civilian casualties in Gaza, especially those of innocent children, are so overwhelming that it feels borderline trivializing to contemplate making a movie dramatizing the scenario. Reality should be, and is, enough. But a filmmaker like Ben Hania, who has previously toyed with the fluidity of actuality and representation, is the perfect person to span documentary and fiction. She builds a taut thriller around the inherent humanity of its central ordering principle: 70 minutes of an archival call from Hind Rajab while trapped in a car under siege by the IDF.
There’s a fine line between a high-concept execution and gimmickry, and “The Voice of Hind Rajab” never steps on the wrong side. Ben Hania delineates how the film will work from the jump. When an audio waveform animation (identified with a file name) is on screen, she’s leveraging voices from the distress calls across several hours of Hind Rajab’s attempts for rescue. This bleeds into and interacts with her recreations of the tense effort by volunteers at the West Bank’s Red Crescent to send an ambulance to save her.
These dramatized bits of the film enhance the visceral power of the call without overwhelming it. Actors in these re-enactments are not there to supply or supplant the humanity in the proceedings as they unfold. Instead, Ben Hania leans on the performers to help add context and complication to the silences on the call.
“The Voice of Hind Rajab” does not aim squarely to activate the tear ducts. It unfolds much like a political thriller or hostage rescue adventure once Omar (Motaz Malhees) reaches the trapped child following a tip from her uncle in Germany. His initial instinct is to mobilize a crew to evacuate her immediately, yet he runs into resistance from his superior, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel). From his more comprehensive vantage point, Mahdi knows to remain circumspect and weigh the many lives affected by their decision-making.
As Rana (Saja Kilani) and Nisreen (Clara Khoury) attempt to keep Hind alive and on the line, a web of bureaucratic procedures kicks into high gear inside the office. For Mahdi to dispatch a rescue team, he must secure an elusive “green light” through back-channel communications with Israeli officials. Even then, there’s no guarantee of safety – just a vague reassurance that they will be able to escape without confrontation. It’s a Kafkaesque twist that further proves the need for Ben Hania’s film to exist. In art as in life, Palestinians exist in the absurd position of navigating a maze meant to deny their full humanity.
The intensity of their deliberations also reveals another devastating calculus faced by the Red Crescent. The sanctity of Hind Rajab’s life must be balanced against the scarcity of resources available to help countless others like her in peril. Ben Hania renders her pains and joys in vivid detail. Indeed, the film’s most affecting moments are Hind’s highly specific responses to the threats around her, such as “I’m afraid of the dark.” But the scale of the calamity in Gaza means that those in the best position to shield her from harm must see this unique case as a commonplace one.
As the narrative careens toward its inevitably tragic end, Ben Hania makes a forceful artistic intervention in “The Voice of Hind Rajab” to collapse any remaining barriers between fiction and reality. It’s a bold artistic choice that layers in video footage of the Red Crescent volunteers on top of their cinematically recreated versions. At their most vulnerable, Ben Hania recognizes the humanity of these brave individuals. With the camera’s focus shifting between the two simultaneous versions of a scene, she further acknowledges the impossibility of art’s ability to supersede lived experience.
There’s a version of this film that exists as just as an ideological project, and it could become only that to parties who look to lionize (or weaponize) it. But Ben Hania does more than just declare her message of humanity; she embodies it. A striking visual motif in the film concerns the characters catching their reflections in glass as their profiles merge with others, be it a photo of Hind Rajab or the image of a colleague. May all who see “The Voice of Hind Rajab” also see themselves reflected in the movie: both in the innocent life senselessly taken from the world too early and in those with the solemn responsibility to protect all others. [A-]
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