After Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl, was found dead in Gaza City on Feb. 10, 2024, she quickly became one of the most visible victims of Israel’s war against Hamas in Gaza. Twelve days earlier, on Jan. 29, Hind had spent hours trapped in a car, surrounded by dead family members, as she awaited an ambulance. Two paramedics were killed trying to retrieve her.
Rather than visualize these horrific events from Hind’s perspective, Kaouther Ben Hania’s dramatized feature “The Voice of Hind Rajab” evokes them in ways both powerfully direct and purposefully removed.
The film takes place almost entirely in an emergency call center in the West Bank city of Ramallah, about 50 miles from the girl’s location. As the movie opens, the center, run by the Palestine Red Crescent Society, is taking calls from Gaza, where the organization can, up to a point, send aid and monitor real-time movements of vehicles on digital maps. A call comes in from an uncle of Hind’s in Germany: His brother’s family needs help near a gas station in Gaza City.
Omar (Motaz Malhees), the dispatcher who speaks to him, calls a number in the car. A girl answers, but moments later, we hear what sounds like gunfire, and her voice goes silent. Omar hasn’t even had time to get her name. But he soon gets word from the uncle that another girl is still alive in the car, so he calls again and reaches Hind, who goes by Hanood.
From then on, “The Voice of Hind Rajab” becomes a frantic chronicle of the group’s efforts to coordinate a rescue, as the unseen Hind pleads with the call center workers — principally Omar and his supervisor, Rana (Saja Kilani) — to retrieve her.
But a rescue is far from a straightforward task. As Omar grows increasingly agitated, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel) reminds him to focus on maintaining contact with Hind; Mahdi is the one who must secure a safe route for the ambulance, which involves labyrinthine communication with intermediaries. Omar is impatient, but to act without clearance would risk getting the rescuers killed. A fourth call center worker, Nisreen (Clara Khoury), counsels her rattled colleagues.
The growing tension is captured in isolating close-ups and shallow focus. Reflections in the office’s glass partitions emphasize the confined atmosphere and create the sensation that the workers are boxed in, as they cope not only with the urgency of the situation but also with keeping their bearings. Visually, this widescreen film is a virtuoso exercise in (mostly) single-location filmmaking. It would make a valuable, complementary double feature with a thematically related film from this year, Sepideh Farsi’s documentary “Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk,” which focuses on several months of calls between Farsi and Fatma Hassona, a Gaza City resident who was killed in an Israeli airstrike this April.
Ben Hania’s most debatable decision involves using the actual phone calls. Hind’s voice is real, and at some moments, so are those of the call center workers. At the movie’s climax, the filmmaker conjures an optical illusion that directly links the actors and the people they are playing: We see a smartphone positioned in front of the performers, as if it’s filming them. But the phone screen shows the real Nisreen, Omar and Mahdi.
In the closing minutes, Ben Hania, who previously mixed re-enactments and documentary in “Four Daughters” (2023), includes an interview with Hind’s mother. Clearly, the project has been made with care and attention to ethical considerations. But using a dead girl’s voice is a potent device. As wrenching as “The Voice of Hind Rajab” is, there is something uneasy-making about turning a child’s harrowing cries for help into a pretext for metacinematic flourishes. Hind’s story does not need that kind of intellectualized gimmickry, in which recordings of authentic terror serve as proof of the staging’s verisimilitude.
The Voice of Hind Rajab Not rated. In Arabic, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 29 minutes. In theaters.
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