Dir. Kaouther Ben Hania, France/Tunisia, 2025, 89 mins, in Arabic with subtitles
Cast: Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Clara Khoury, Amer Hlehel
Review by Colin Dibben
The Ramallah based Red Crescent emergency service call centre receives a series of mobile phone calls from Hind Rajab. Hind is a scared 6-year-old Palestinian girl who is stuck in a car in the Gaza Strip that has been shot up by the Israeli Defence Force (IDF). Hind is lying next to several dead relatives – in fact her older cousin makes the first phone call before being shot by an IDF tank.
The film is wholly set in the call centre as a handful of workers, especially Rana (Kilani) and Omar (Malhees) speak to Hind, whom we never see. Their manager Mahdi (Hlehel) tries to coordinate safely sending an ambulance to rescue Hind. The process is complex: Mahdi at one point draws a diagram that looks like the ‘8 on its side’ symbol of infinity; and the process isn’t followed in good faith on the IDF side anyway.
Hind’s voice is represented using the actual audio files from the calls, the digital trace of which fills the whole screen. A sequence in which real social media footage from inside the centre is used in the foreground while the actors replicate events in the background, suggests that the level of fictional dramatisation here is low.
How many films can you name that are both tense thrillers and completely heartbreaking? I know, I know … ‘heartbreaking’ is a cliché, but I was sobbing intermittently and so were plenty of others in the cinema. I am usually a hard bastard until the manipulative music starts (I’m thinking of you, Max Richter, and the unearned emotional resolution your music brings to a film like Hamnet) but The Voice of Hind Rajab accomplishes something else entirely – without music.
Audiences will respond to the helplessness of all involved here, but this is going to feel very traumatic to some. The film is utterly relentless and there is no ‘catharsis through art’. In fact, given that you know the outcome of the story from the beginning, the only horizon of hope is a full disclosure of the aftermath.
There’s a trauma counsellor character, Nisreen (Khoury) who tells the call centre workers speaking to little Hind – and breaking down at their own powerlessness and the impossibility of the task – to ‘take deep breaths and sip water’. When I looked around the cinema, there were plenty of people like me taking her advice in an attempt to stay calm.
Traumatic stuff to watch, but the film is a perfect allegory for all of us watching the ongoing genocide in Gaza.
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