Festival ovations are overblown for a simple reason: the same casts, crews, families, and financiers who float down the red carpet on a champagne high are the ones who linger to cheer their own work. That was not the case with “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” which drew the most effusive reaction I’ve ever witnessed at the Venice Film Festival – this time from a crowd with no stake in the film. At its Wednesday morning press screening, applause thundered through the credits, breaking only when attendees collapsed into full-body sobs.
No mystery there. While that audience had no investment in the production, we all share a stake in the world it reflects – a world Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania renders with unbearable clarity in her new film. Setting raw audio against meticulously staged reenactments, her hybrid docufiction gives searing form to the most wrenching material, recreating in real-time the final hours of a six-year-old girl in Gaza.
Of course, the camera never recreates the war-ravaged streets; the sound alone is harrowing enough. Instead, we sit with the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Ramallah, as emergency workers struggle to coordinate a rescue. On the morning of Jan. 29, 2024, they field a call from a man in Germany, frantic about relatives trapped beneath Israeli fire. The line soon connects with a car under siege – its passengers already silenced, save for one small voice, begging to be saved.
The team scrambles to respond, their urgency blunted by procedure. An ambulance sits less than two miles away, but before its crew can make the eight-minute drive they must first obtain clearance from the Israeli army – a step that requires mediation from two other NGOs. There is nothing to do but wait, keeping the girl on the line.
Speaking in her own voice, Hind Rajab sketches a vibrant life reduced to a grim statistic. She has a younger brother, safe with kin elsewhere in Gaza; she loves the sea and attends a school called A Happy Childhood; and she grows slowly aware of her own precarity—at first describing six relatives in the car as sleeping, before admitting in a later call, “they’re all dead.”
Between calls, the tension at the dispatch builds to seismic levels. The performers often seem to read directly from transcripts – a choice Ben Hania underscores by occasionally blending the real dispatcher audio with the actors’ dialogue. In the pauses between, however, she allows for more dramatic license.
Here we meet the four staffers, all played by Palestinian actors. Rana (Saja Kilani), the youngest, proves the most skilled at soothing the child on the other end of the line. Team leader Nisreen (Clara Khoury) radiates unshakable calm, guiding both colleagues and caller through steady breathing exercises. Omar (Motaz Malhees), a chain-smoker frayed by helplessness, ducks into the bathroom to rage through first-person shooters on his phone, and when that fails, he lashes out at his supervisor, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel).
As the point man, Mahdi shoulders the heaviest burden. Every new plea sharpens Omar’s fury that they won’t simply send the ambulance waiting nearby. But Mahdi knows the score: without Israeli clearance, dispatching the crew would only make them targets. Instead, he maps out the labyrinthine approval chain on a whiteboard – a tangle of steps and sub-steps looping back on themselves until the diagram resembles a figure-eight, an infinity sign, going nowhere, forever.
Fueled by sorrow and fury, “The Voice of Hind Rajab” refuses to gloss up its images. The reenactments look and feel like just that, set in a drab, location-appropriate office where harsh fluorescent lights bear down, mirroring the white-hot rage of those onscreen, behind the camera, and in the audience. While the norms of current discourse will almost certainly brand the film “one-sided” – and as I left the Venice screening, I overheard an Israeli journalist fretting aloud about how to cover it without, shall we say, severe blowback – Ben Hania shows little interest in agitprop. By burrowing into the granular details of this one tragedy on this one day, she arrives at an extraordinarily far-reaching articulation of an acutely contemporary emotion.
“The Voice of Hind Rajab” captures the technological powerlessness that defines our age. We now watch atrocities in real time, live-streaming genocides with little more agency than to decide whether to switch over to content a shade less morally depleting. And often we must, if only to summon the stamina to return, to keep watching, to bear witness. For those quick to dismiss or denounce, I’d urge only this: listen to this voice. Because in it, all of us can recognize the same pain.
