There can be no doubt about which movie has set the Venice film festival ablaze – it is this one, from Tunisian film-maker Kaouther Ben Hania. The Voice of Hind Rajab is about the horrifying ordeal of the five-year-old Palestinian girl Hind Rajab, who was killed in 2024 by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza in her uncle’s car along with six family members, and two paramedics who tried to come to her rescue. Rajab herself, who survived the original assault by the IDF which killed those around her, stayed on the phone for hours to the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), desperately begging for help. With startling audacity, Ben Hania has used the real audio recording of Rajab’s heart-wrenching voice, while fictionally reconstructing the drama of the emergency responders in their call-centre office, with real people played by actors, talking, shouting and emoting in response to Rajab’s actual voice.
The result was greeted with a 23-minute standing ovation at Venice, about a quarter of the film’s running time, with journalists and festival attenders reportedly sobbing in the auditorium. Since that passionate reception, others have wondered if there is not something questionable or exploitative in presenting this authentic shattering recording in a Hollywoodised suspense drama, getting actors to cry and rage alongside a kind of docufictional hologram, almost instructing the audience in how they too should be responding. I wonder. Perhaps Ben Hania’s high-concept idea is debatable, and it might have been just as moving to present this extraordinary real-life recording in the straightforward documentary context of interviews with the responders and emergency workers. This might have made clearer what happened from their point of view, why they were impeded from helping Rajab and what continues to hinder them.
But it must also be said: there is a reckless, ruthless kind of provocative brilliance in what Ben Hania is doing. Is it in bad taste? Problematic? Well, in a world where directors busy themselves and us with made-up stories about made-up people, Ben Hania is at least grabbing one of the most relevant issues of our time with both hands and finding a way to thrust it under our noses. I can’t agree with people who say there is “silence” on Gaza when it is so dominant in our discourse, but the director is right to reach for a way of engaging with the real world. In 20 years, there might be no debate about the propriety of telling this story in a docufictional mix. So why not do it now, when the issues are live?
Motaz Malhees plays Omar, the emergency centre responder, taking calls on his phone headset, who first hears from Rajab’s desperate cousin in Germany, who had been called from the car. From there, Omar makes docufictional contact with Rajab herself, whose unbearably sad and unbearably real cries pierce the fabric of the drama: “My family – they’re all dead!”; “It will be dark soon – I’m scared!”. Omar’s own distress means he has to be calmed by his supervisor Rana (Saja Kilani).
Omar works out that the little girl’s location is at a petrol station no more than eight minutes’ drive from the nearest ambulance, and some of the film’s most agonising moments consist of simply showing the PRCS’s digital map of the ambulance inching its way down bombed streets. But protocol holds up simply ordering the ambulance to drive there. The embattled coordinator Mahdi (Amer Hlehel) has to explain to hothead Omar that he can’t just radio the ambulance drivers and tell them to get moving. He must first establish a clear, safe route for them to drive down, and this has to be done in time-consuming cooperation with the International Committee of the Red Cross and the Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories, a unit in Israel’s Ministry of Defence. A mad ambulance dash through a war zone will simply result in the ambulance being hit and its occupants killed – people, he points out, with families and children.
And so Ben Hania brings us to the issue that will always recur in this debate. Shouting with rage, Omar says: “How can you coordinate with the army that killed them?” Omar is making that familiar accusation: complicity. Mahdi has to keep his cool and explain to Omar that this is the reality he has to deal with. It is a fierce, vehement piece of work.
