“The voices on the phone are real.” So states the caption that appears on screen early in Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, as Palestinian Red Crescent volunteer Omar (Motaz Malhees) answers a call. The actors are real. The script is real. The fiction is real — this is a dramatization of events that genuinely occurred in Palestine in January 2024. But the voices on the phone are real in a different, nonfiction sense. Hind Rajab, six of her family members, and two paramedics were killed by Israeli forces in the Gaza Strip. In Ben Hania’s film, we hear Hind’s voice, but we see a fictionalized version of the rescue attempt that failed to save her life. It’s her voice, but it’s not her story.
Omar is one of several volunteers working non-stop over many hours to save Hind, trapped in the back of a car, surrounded by the corpses of her family after an Israeli attack. Ben Hania traps the audience too, in the Red Crescent office, as time passes, hope waxes and wanes, and tension increases. The injection of suspense into a true, well-documented story is often questionable, not least when the outcome is as broadly known as it is here. Given the scale of the Palestinian suffering, though, the non-historical context, and the sheer heinousness of what happened to Hind and her family, it’s particularly distasteful. But Ben Hania doesn’t want to place her audience in Hind’s position, to evoke her pain or her fear. She wants to place us in the Red Crescent office, to experience a manipulative rollercoaster of emotions with the murder of a five-year-old as the fuel.
Ben Hania’s movie is an exploitative one both in effect and in intent. That it should prioritize a cynical depiction of the stress and horror of the volunteers over an earnest depiction of Hind and her situation is lamentable enough, but Ben Hania yields to melodrama and didacticism even within the misguided framework of her scenario. There are poignant anecdotes, dramatic interruptions, cutesy running gags, camera effects, political speeches, a panoply of the bluntest, most theatrical dramaturgical devices that will no doubt appeal immensely to middlebrow, middle-class European audiences who’ve been trained to view this crude, reductive style of filmmaking as fine and complex. It seems designed to generate the maximum emotional response, but in a simplistic, familiar way — for all the pain on display in The Voice of Hind Rajab, it’s never even a remotely difficult or discomfiting watch.
That is, alas, unless one resists its manipulation and analyzes its purpose, rather than its effect. Just as Hind’s last hours alive are used for dramatic ends, her image is even used — Omar brandishes it toward his supervisor, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), in the hope of expediting her rescue effort. The image is used against the audience, too — a reminder less of the tragedy of what happened to Hind, more of the sorrow and sympathy we should be feeling, since that tragedy is, in Ben Hania’s movie, secondary to her would-be rescuers’ story. The handheld camera and temporal ellipses are used to engender a sense of immediacy, enhancing the urgency through claustrophobia and real-time dramatics. And the blend of real audio footage and staged re-enactment is used to emphasize the verity of the events herein. But no artistic recreation can ever be truly objective, and Ben Hania’s hammy editorializing cheapens and diminishes the value of that verity. A real atrocity, part of an immeasurably greater atrocity that is, today, still far from over, has been stripped for pieces and used, used, and used again, and for the most banal, unremarkable movie otherwise.
Ben Hania’s work here, in striving for immediacy, may seek to be seen as immersing its audience in the situation it depicts, and, in fairness, it achieves this. But this is an evasion of its duty, in its cynical exploitation of both the story of Hind Rajab’s death and the recordings that captured her final hours, not to immerse an audience already largely at considerable remove from the horrors of those hours in said horrors, but to confront us with them. Instead, we watch figures at their own remove from those horrors. The voices on the phone are real, but, for the audience, the threat is not. It’s abstract and unseen, not the active, genocidal threat that is directly responsible for Hind Rajab’s death. This is one of the crassest, most irresponsible movies in a very long time, not in spite of its well-meant intentions, but due to them.
Published as part of LFF 2025 — Dispatch 2.
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