(3 stars)
The new film by Oscar-nominated Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania appears to open with a blurred view of a moonlit horizon and the hiss of a busy sea — but it doesn’t.
These aren’t those types of waves, and what we’re hearing is actually a froth of crisscrossing digital signals. This hint of horizon is a deception, and what we’re actually looking at is the sound of the call at the core of “The Voice of Hind Rajab.” It’s the first of many moments in the film that occupy an unsettling place between the real and the imaginary.
If Hind’s name sounds familiar, it’s because the audio of the 6-year-old girl’s call made international news (including a Washington Post investigation). On Jan. 29, 2024, after Israeli forces ordered the evacuation of the Gazan neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa, Hind’s aunt and uncle attempted to flee the city with Hind and her four cousins in tow. Before they could escape, their car came under fire outside a gas station.
A recorded call between young Hind, the only survivor of the attack, and a team of emergency service operators at the Palestine Red Crescent Society call center 50 miles away in Ramallah captures a harrowing 3½-hour ordeal, made worse by a hamstrung response. Twelve days would pass before a Palestinian civil defense crew would reach their bullet-riddled car — and the charred ambulance sent to rescue them.
“The Voice of Hind Rajab” is a self-proclaimed dramatization “based on real events and emergency calls recorded that day.” A small and sharply cast ensemble of actors fill the roles of the call center crew in Ramallah: Omar (Motaz Malhees), Rana (Saja Kilani), Nisreen (Clara Khoury) and Mahdi (Amer Hlehel).
These liberties, taken by Ben Hania with the blessing of Hind’s mother, authorize the film to widen its lens to document a cascade of system failures as responders attempt to respond. Meanwhile, the performances, while humanizing the responders, feel more in service of protecting (and preserving) the fragile artifact of the audio. In an interview, Ben Hania has expressed discomfort with any characterization that attempts to pin the film’s place between reportage and impressionism: “The narration is not about invention,” she said, “but about a transmission of memory, of grief, of failure.”
This isn’t Ben Hania’s first time refracting reality through the lens of performance: In the Oscar-nominated experimental 2023 documentary “Four Daughters,” she integrated actors into the household of a Tunisian mother and her two youngest daughters to play her missing eldest two daughters, who left to join Daesh fighters in Libya. The film tells a multidimensional story of loss, where memory is both honored and exposed as futile.
Here, the effect is immediate and immediately horrifying. A call comes into Omar’s line, a woman screaming, “They are shooting at us!” A hail of fire. The call ends. Omar soon learns that a 6-year-old girl is still alive in the car. He calls back, and the call carries us forward.
“The Voice of Hind Rajab” toggles between performance and playback; an unadorned visualization of the sound file is responsible for some of the film’s most chilling moments. Ben Hania allows the audio to expose its own horrors — the roar and squeal of passing tanks, the distortion of gunfire, the tatters of the threadbare signal. The violence and destruction leveling Gaza are here flattened and sharpened into a dagger of sound.
If the dramatic use of such raw material chafes to consider, it’s wrenching to experience. Hind is not just trapped in the car — she’s trapped in time, in history, in headlines, in the audio that materializes on-screen like a line of digital razor wire and charges the film with an unceasing current of emotional voltage.
The dramatization doesn’t always benefit the movement of the story — there’s a lot of waiting for calls to be answered or returned, and the film condenses the hours of counterproductive protocols between agencies (required to authorize a rescue that could have taken eight minutes) into short, repetitive bouts of frustration.
But the film’s final documentary turn — once the recording runs out and Hind’s voice can no longer be heard — strips away all narrative padding and grants her mother a place to memorialize her grief. This time, the view of the horizon and sea is clear. In Ben Hania’s hands, what is real and what is imagined matters less once reality becomes unimaginable.
Unrated. At Angelika Film Center and AFI Silver. Contains intense, mature themes of war, violence and loss. In Arabic, with English subtitles. 89 minutes.
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