★★★★★

It’s almost insignificant for me to sit here and write what I thought about this movie; the technicalities, the story, the acting, and everything in between. My words mean nothing. The moment the credits rolled, I sat in silence trying to process what I had just watched.

Directed and written by Kaouther Ben Hania, The Voice of Hind Rajab is a docudrama that tells the very real events of the Palestinian Red Crescent volunteers who receive an emergency call from a five year old girl named Hind Rajab. We find out that she is trapped in a car in Gaza, with the dead bodies of her four cousins, her aunt, and her uncle. Over the course of the film, we follow the three hour phone call as the volunteers do everything in their power to save her.

This movie is a blend of actual recordings and scripted scenes, and there are incredible filmmaking techniques that remind audiences that this movie is not fiction, but in fact the reality of right now, and something of recent history that can’t be ignored. The audio from the phone calls in the film are completely real, so we become privy to the final pleas of this little girl in the scariest moment of her life. There are also clever blends of real footage and audio from the dispatchers on the scene, which coincide with the actors’ reenactment, only giving us a glimpse of what these people did to try and rescue her.

Keeping the location of the movie to their office brings us into their world. We feel utterly helpless as relentless violence fills the screen. Not through a bloody spectacle or violent imagery, but in the simple act of just bearing witness to her voice. We have unfortunately become desensitised from the grotesque imagery we see on social media, but with Hind Rajab’s cries and desperate prayers being isolated through soundwave imagery on screen, we are forced to sit there with the brutality. 

Ben Hania presents a film that can’t help but assault all of our senses. It almost feels wrong to be using a child to break through the propaganda, but at this point if it allows for conversations like this to happen more in mainstream media, then what else can we do? We are faced with a genocide before our very eyes, with a movie that completely centres around one murder of a child in Gaza out of more than 20,000 since the 7th of October 2023. These films are meant to scare us, they’re meant to be hostile, and they’re meant to be a lesson in humanity.

I left the cinema in agony and sat in my car completely devastated after being witness to something so confronting and violent. Again, it feels wrong to be critiquing this movie, because how could you? This docudrama is more than just a film. Movies like this will continue to be important in creating discourse on the horrors of what is happening in Gaza. 

It’s also a haunting reminder of the beautiful little girl named Hind Rajab.