‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’ deserves to be seen

The dramatization, which skirts the boundary of documentary, is set entirely in the West Bank’s Red Crescent offices. But before we meet our characters, the movie familiarizes us with an image central to its unspooling: a close up of an audio waveform that will, during its occasional appearances, jitter up and down against a black screen, as voices emanate from desperate phone calls. As on-screen text denotes, the recordings heard in the film are all completely real. However, the first sound we hear isn’t a human voice, but rather, a dreamlike recollection of tides crashing against sandy shores; waves of a different sort. According to Hind’s mother—whose express permission Ben Hania sought before making the movie—the little girl loved the ocean. While the story is a deeply distressing tragedy, it’s also about the loss of a real person with a dashed future, an idea the director ensures to center whenever possible, despite the drama hinging on her disembodied voice.

In January 2024, recordings of Hind’s phone calls hit social media airwaves as the onslaught was still ongoing, and she was still trapped in her family’s Kia Picanto alongside the bodies of her dead cousins. The compact vehicle would end up twisted by 355 bullets, some fired from a tank just meters away. Much of this carnage can be heard over the emergency calls, alongside Hind’s terrified pleas for help.

Her timid voice is how the world first met her, and it’s how The Voice of Hind Rajab creates its painful dramatic parameters. We’re introduced, earlier in the day, to a pair of emergency call handlers—the fiery Omar (Motaz Malhees) and the tender Rana (Saja Kilani)—as well as the center’s grief counselor Nisreen (Clara Khoury), and its steely dispatch supervisor Mahdi (Amer Hlehel). Unlike the real Red Crescent headquarters, this semi-fictional version is rendered with glass walls, refracting its characters’ harrowed expressions, and turning them into canvases for maps and other information emanating from workplace projectors. This imaginative re-design also allows Ben Hania and cinematographer Juan Sarmiento G.’s camera to peek through offices and cubicles, and rack focus between the characters rather than cutting away and breaking the tension.

The story provides just enough context for each person’s job before diving headfirst into the calamity. Before we know it, the film’s initially procedural form—about tracing phone calls and locations, and re-routing medics as needed—is thrown into emotional disarray when Omar listens to a woman being shot dead in real time over his headset. In lieu of a photograph, Nisreen hands him a sticker of a silhouette to place at his work station. This is far from the first time they’ve lost someone, and they already have procedures in place to deal with it when it happens. But before the characters have time to grieve, they’re alerted to the fact that the woman’s 5-year-old niece is still in the car, surrounded by Israeli tanks. Until they can get clearance to send an ambulance to her location—a hellish process involving navigating collapsed buildings, and the indignity of seeking permission from the very Israeli military firing upon Hind—Omar and Rana must do what they can to keep the little girl on the phone, assess the situation, and reassure her that help is on the way.

Foreknowledge of Hind’s fate fills each twist and turn with dramatic irony, but The Voice of Hind Rajab isn’t merely a retelling of a little girl’s final hours. Contained, within the movie’s claustrophobic setting, are interpersonal skirmishes that speak to the ethical gridlocks in which the Red Crescent workers find themselves, which they’re thrust into by the Israeli occupation. They even sketch some of these conundrums out on the various glass surfaces, visualizing (and simplifying) the hurdles before them. Omar, who’s deeply perturbed by these developments, harangues Mahdi to get an ambulance out to Hind as fast as possible, but Mahdi is bound by regulations to keep emergency workers safe, and by labyrinthine procedures to ensure that they aren’t blamed for their own slaughter. Omar has lost callers over the phone, but Mahdi has sent emergency responders to their deaths, resulting in heated clashes over the best course of action.

Of course, any movie based on real events—especially one made during still-ongoing atrocities—is bound to attract queries as to its point, its effectiveness, and the ethics of its existence. However, these questions are bound up in the movie’s drama too, within the dilemma of whether or not to publish the recordings online while Hind is still trapped without rescue, in a helpless plea to anyone who’ll listen. “Do you really think the voice of a scared little girl will spark their empathy?” yells Omar in a pivotal moment, as the camera’s lens begins to turn on itself.

This lampshading is no mere avoidant escape hatch. Ben Hania’s best films exist in the razor thin margin between fiction and reality, and The Voice of Hind Rajab is no exception. Her 2023 docu-drama Four Sisters retells the tale of two Tunisian girls who left their family to marry ISIS fighters in Libya, and has professional actresses stand-in for the pair of them, while their two younger sisters play themselves. Their mother, meanwhile, acts out her own flashbacks on occasion, but an experienced actress stands in for her during difficult scenes. This leads to intriguing moments when the two versions of the matriarch blend together, and they speak practically at the same time, their voices overlapping in the soundtrack.

The human voice is an important tool in Ben Hania’s work, and her use of real recordings in The Voice of Hind Rajab is sparing, despite the movie being filled with phone calls. Usually, when Omar or Mahdi speak to bureaucrats or first responders in an effort to wade through red tape, we only hear their side of the conversation. The real voices in distress, along with close ups of waveforms on a black screen—in whose surface Omar and Rana are frequently reflected—remains reserved for the film’s most pressing dramatic moments. In the process, the human voice as filtered and muffled through speakers becomes a ghostly presence, and the actors become spiritual mediums attempting to commune with the dead. 

This use of flawed technology brings to mind the recent Gaza documentary Put Your Soul on Your Hand And Walk, whose young journalist subject Fatma Hassona was killed days before its Cannes premiere. In that film, director Sepideh Farsi records her fuzzy video calls with Hassona using a separate phone, rather than screen-recording their conversations, further embodying the difficulty of reaching out and helping her. In The Voice of Hind Rajab, the static that obscures parts of Hind’s S.O.S. calls further emphasizes the vast distance between her and the emergency workers, making the situation all the more despairing.

There are even moments in Ben Hania’s movie where, much like in Four Daughters, the boundary between the characters and the people they’re based on begins to blur, courtesy of cellphone footage filmed as the real events transpired. These images, although they draw attention to the artifice of re-enactment, pierce the veil between the film’s reality and our own, practically making them one. They act as a moving reminder that whether or not hearing Hind’s voice “sparks (someone’s) empathy,” the documentation of genocide is a vital act all on its own, as a reminder of the worst atrocities of which human beings are capable, and the limits to which people will still push themselves to do what’s right—or what little they can, when all seems hopeless. But by the end, even though the film has provided no catharsis or emotional refuge, it continually leaves reminders of the full lives, of those like Hind Rajab, that were viciously taken, and in the process, the many radiant futures still worth fighting for.