Though we’ve seen countless horrendous hours of the ongoing genocide in Gaza on screen, from TV news to documentaries to floods of video on social media, it’s been a wound too fresh for a relatively major drama to handle until now, Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab mixes documentary and dramatic reenactment to devastating effect. Using the real audio of the calls between the Palestinian Red Crescent emergency services and Hind Rajab, the little girl murdered by the IDF when they decided that she was threat enough to warrant firing 355 bullets at the car she was in, Ben Hania brings to life of the most horrifying crimes from Israel’s endless list over the last two years.
Set across the day and night of 29th January 2024 entirely within the Red Crescent call centre, Ben Hania keeps the actual horrors off screen, a wise choice when even the tinny sound of them over the shaky phone connection is so horrifying. Knowing that it was going to be using the authentic audio, The Voice of Hind Rajab is a film I walked into with a sense of dread, and that never dissipates – to see this movie is to spend 90 minutes listening to a real five-year-old child actually die at the hands of heavily armed soldiers.
That part of Ben Hania’s film is, essentially, unreviewable – it simply is what it is and it’s sickening. Hind’s uncertainty and rising panic as she describes the corpses in the car with her and her fear of what will happen when it gets dark; it scours the soul. Of course, the drama attached cannot be as affecting, a chamber piece of the dispatchers’ own grief and frustration as the situation worsens and the combination of IDF violence and Israeli governmental bureaucracy makes them powerless.
It is, in fact, a relief whenever we cut back to the scripted drama, an escape from the unbearable reality – The Voice of Hind Rajab runs at under 90 minutes but feels much, much longer than that. All the Red Crescent’s fears and hopes as they try to coordinate an ambulance pickup for Hind while keeping her calm on the phone with them are well-played by the cast but ultimately can’t really hit home – we already know how this story ends, so the dramatics here are more just to fill the time until the inevitable than to truly move you.
The one real flourish Ben Hania allows herself after 80-or-so minutes of committed, straightforward retelling is to fully reveal the artifice of her own project – as the social media expert of the team films the rest of the dispatchers, her phone screen displays the real individuals instead of the actors we’ve been seeing. It’s a disarming thing, an admission of sorts that this is, ultimately, just a movie; that the reality of Hind Rajab’s murder can’t possibly fully translate to a comfortable audience in a cinema. Yet, in its simple act of having you sit down and silently listen to a little girl fruitlessly beg not to be killed, it has a nauseating power.
Jack Blackwell – Film Reviews 