When the subject is Gaza, it’s hard to know what to say anymore, especially when caught in conversation with people who are unmoved by the plight of the Palestinians, people who reject the international consensus that Israel is inflicting apartheid policies and genocidal campaigns against an occupied population. Omar, an impassioned Red Crescent volunteer in the soul-shaking new feature from Kaouther Ben Hania, wonders at a certain point in the tense action how it can be that countless online images of maimed, orphaned and slaughtered Palestinian children have been met by so much silence and seeming indifference. Ben Hania counters that silence, not with an explicit argument but with an experience, a movie forged in the universal and very specific language of the single-location thriller.
Ultra-specifically, The Voice of Hind Rajab is a headset thriller. Like the Danish drama The Guilty and its U.S. remake, the taut feature zeroes in on deskbound people talking on the phone to someone in distress. This is no mere genre outing, though; it’s rooted in a well-documented story with profound and distressing geopolitical significance. Within the film’s compact running time, writer-director Ben Hania traces the fraught and torturous hours of January 29, 2024, when Palestine Red Crescent volunteers in the West Bank tried to calm a terrified 6-year-old girl and get an ambulance to her in Gaza. The office manager in the film succinctly explains the situation to another agency: Hind Rajab is “trapped in a car with the corpses of her family. Surrounded by tanks and bombing.”
The Voice of Hind Rajab
The Bottom Line
Intensely involving and resounding.
Venue: Venice Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Amer Hlehel, Clara Khoury, Nesbat Serhan
Director-screenwriter: Kaouther Ben Hania
1 hour 29 minutes
As she did in her Oscar-nominated Four Daughters, Ben Hania lights a connective fuse between documentary and drama. Forming the throughline of The Voice of Hind Rajab are the actual emergency-line recordings of conversations between the panicked girl and the Red Crescent workers: Hind Rajab’s pleas for help and the nearly verbatim responses of the volunteers, delivered by actors who hold the screen with performances of pulsing immediacy.
At the Palestine Red Crescent Emergency Call Center, in the relatively quiet West Bank city of Ramallah, chaos and desperation steadily seep into an orderly workplace, a space that Ben Hania brings to dynamic life, with Juan Sarmiento G.’s camerawork catching the shifting levels of focus within production designer Bassem Marzouk’s layers of glass enclosures. The first crack in the tightly held calm arrives when Omar (Motaz Malhees) receives a call from a man in Germany, reporting that a carful of his relatives came under fire as they attempted to evacuate their neighborhood in northern Gaza. Their vehicle sits at a gas station a quarter-mile from their home, and not all of them were killed. “They’re shooting at us!” a girl in the car tells Omar when he reaches her by phone. Then there are screams, followed by silence.
A second message from Germany alerts Omar that there’s still someone alive and hidden in the car, a 6-year-old girl. With her are the dead bodies of her aunt, uncle and four cousins, including the first girl Omar spoke with. “Come get me!” Hind says. But it’s not that simple, much to Omar’s growing exasperation.
The call center, 52 miles from that gas station, has been handling Gaza emergencies for months now, since the IDF’s bombing began. But there’s nothing routine about any of this for the people on the receiving end of those calls. Omar, tormented by the first girl’s dying screams, enlists the help of his exhausted supervisor, Rana (Saja Kilani, riveting), who was on her way home after a long shift when Hind’s predicament first crossed his screen. They take turns on the phone, doing what they can to distract Hind from her dire situation. It’s an all but impossible task, and one that shakes them to the core, not least when Rana — a voice of gentle, maternal concern and desperately feigned lightheartedness — listens to Hind tell her that her school is called A Happy Childhood.
The head of their office, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), must figure out a safe route for medic Youssef Zaïno and driver Ahmed Madhoun, the Red Crescent’s only remaining ambulance team in Gaza’s northern region. “Coordination” is the operative word, describing a byzantine process that requires communication with the Red Cross in Jerusalem or the West Bank’s Ministry of Health, who then will contact a unit of the Israeli Ministry of Defense. The goal is to get accurate, up-to-the-minute information from soldiers on the ground without dealing with them directly.
Having seen many of his colleagues killed on the job, Mahdi is unbending in his determination to secure this green light through the established channels. With the ambulance only eight minutes away from Hind, Omar sees only insanity in the way the situation stretches into an hours-long ordeal. Omar’s growing outrage, especially when precious time is lost because of jammed phone lines, troubling silences and false assumptions, rankles Mahdi, the most overstretched of anyone at the call center.
He eventually tasks another person in the office, Leila (Nesbat Serhan), with capturing video and audio from the ongoing phone exchanges and posting it on social media — a flare sent out to a near but far-off world. By the time Nisreen, the office counselor, steps in to offer a calming meditation to Hind, it’s a much-needed balm for the audience as well as for her colleagues. She’s played by Clara Khoury, rounding out an exceptional central quartet of actors.
In the brief moments when actual phone video of the Red Crescent workers is interwoven into the movie’s action, it’s done with a breathtaking directness and simplicity, and it resonates with enormous power.
The Voice of Hind Rajab is the latest in many years’ worth of films about the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank. Its timing makes it especially urgent, but so too did the timing of last year’s No Other Land, and here we are a year later. Tunisia’s official submission to the Academy Awards, it will certainly cut a high profile in the months ahead, and the fact that Hollywood heavy hitters have come on board as executive producers will help to generate awards season attention.
But of course something much more pressing than awards is at stake. The voice of that little girl — “Save me.” “Call someone to pick me up.” — is the voice of a long-besieged people, and the 52 miles that separate her from the Red Crescent in Ramallah is the distance between Palestinians and those of us around the world watching helplessly. It’s hard to know what to say anymore, but I hope many people see this movie, including the California shopkeeper who recently told me there are no innocent children in Gaza.
