Gaza has cast a long shadow over the Venice Film Festival this year, starting with some uncomfortab
Gaza has cast a long shadow over the Venice Film Festival this year, starting with some uncomfortable questions about the conflict for this year’s jury and culminating in a march that was ultimately turned away from the festival’s Ground Zero. Kaouther Ben Hania’s powerful hybrid doc The Voice of Hind Rajab could be the lightning rod that supporters of the Gazan cause are waiting for, an urgent procedural that uses cinematic means — close, hand-held takes and a camera that paces around like an expectant father — to make its point.
It doesn’t hurt that Hollywood liberals such as Brad Pitt, Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix are lending their support, as are Alfonso Cuarón and the Zone of Interest team (Jonathan Glazer and James Wilson). But this extraordinary film doesn’t – or rather shouldn’t — need their assist in sending out a blunt message about the real victims on both sides of this brutal war: the children.
Ben Hania’s film tells the miniature, tragic story of 5-year-old Hind Rami Iyad Rajab, who was killed along with six members of her extended family while trying to flee from Israeli forces during the invasion of Gaza City in January 2024. Based on actual phone transcripts, it is a reenactment with a twist; though the people we see on screen are professional actors, all the voices we hear offscreen are the real thing. It’s a bold, possibly fearless choice, and it’s a credit to the emotional commitment of the cast that it works at all.
Though the nominal focus is Hind Rajab herself, Ben Hania’s film is a window on the world of Palestine’s Red Crescent volunteer service. Dealing with the horrors of the situation in Gaza within the sterile environment of a call center, its workers are feeling increasingly hopeless, caught in the political crossfire of an escalating situation. Things take a turn for the worse when one, Omar (Motaz Malhees), takes a call from a man in Germany, who is calling on behalf of his niece. Within minutes, the child is on the phone. “They’re shooting at us,” she sobs. “The tank is next to me.”
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Omar tracks her position and works out that it should take roughly eight minutes to get the nearest ambulance to her. The controller refuses, however, since he is not prepared to send his people into a warzone without safety guarantees from the forces on either side. Both men’s points are valid, and both have headshots of the fallen on their office wall — Omar’s are civilian casualties, the controller’s are Red Crescent workers killed on duty. Ben Hania latches onto this tension and it fuels the drama as the minutes tick by. Meanwhile, Hind Rajab reveals more gruesome details of the situation she is in, hiding in the wreckage of her relatives’ car. “There are only dead bodies,” she says. “They are all dead.”
What is the hold-up? It seems the main qualification for working with Red Crescent is diplomacy, and while the controller desperately calls in favors from here, there and everywhere, Omar and his co-worker Rana (Saja Kilani) try to keep the child on the phone. Sensing time slip away, Rana has the girl recite the Koran, which she diligently but haltingly does with sounds of gunfire hacking in the background. Surprisingly, it looks like Omar will be the first to buckle under the pressure. “You were trained for this,” says a co-worker. But, really, does enough training exist that would prepare anyone for such a horrific emergency?
Ben Hania seems to have taken some inspiration from Gustav Möller’s 2021 film The Guilty, a single-set thriller that consists almost entirely of (fictional) phone calls. The fact that calls here are so unbearably real adds an extra gut punch to an already distressing scenario. The focus on Red Crescent also keeps the film firmly on course; The Voice of Hind Rajab is not a film about either side of the humanitarian disaster unfolding in Gaza but in the moral no-man’s land in between. You could argue that some of the acting is a little melodramatic, and that its politics are a little idealistic, but when you see the shocking, bullet-torn wreckage of the black Kia that Hind Rajab died in, such quibbles fly out of the window. This vital movie is not about the how or the when, it is all about the why.
Title: The Voice of Hind Rajab
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Director-screenwriter: Kaouther Ben Hania
Cast: Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Clara Khoury, Amer Hlehel
Sales agent: The Party Film Sales
Running time: 1 hr 39 mins
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