SummaryJanuary 29, 2024. Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call. A six-year-old girl is trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. While trying to keep her on the line, they do everything they can to get an ambulance to her. Her name was Hind Rajab.
SummaryJanuary 29, 2024. Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call. A six-year-old girl is trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. While trying to keep her on the line, they do everything they can to get an ambulance to her. Her name was Hind Rajab.
In the last two years, as Israel's onslaught in Gaza has wrought at least 67,000 deaths, it is “the first genocide in history where its victims are broadcasting their own destruction in real time in the desperate, so far vain hope that the world might do something," charged Irish barrister Blinne Ní Ghrálaigh in January 2024. At least 20,000 of those deaths have been children — at a rate of one child per hour. The same month that she said so, one of those children's deaths made particular noise in the international community: that of five-year-old Hind Rajab. Rajab was murdered, alongside six of her family members. While she held out as long as possible, her potentially life-saving help was taken, too, as two paramedics were bombed mere yards away. Trapped in a shattered car with the blood of her family members on her, Rajab spent the last hours of her life on the phone with workers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society (PRCS), an affiliate of the Red Cross, who desperately attempted to circumvent the Draconian red tape imposed by the Israeli military. ✕ Remove Ads Director Kaouther Ben Hania's The Voice of Hind Rajab is a shattering docu-film which utilizes a novel mix of real audio and footage with actors' reconstruction in a Herculean effort to make this profound loss even more immediate. Hers is a utilitarian mission: to embed the audience in the sensory experience of being in a war zone without letting them scroll past or swipe to the next video.
It is deliberately punishing material, channelled through unapologetic, galvanising film-making. Politicians should see it. Decision-makers should see it.
Ben Hania shows little interest in agitprop. By burrowing into the granular details of this one tragedy on this one day, she arrives at an extraordinarily far-reaching articulation of an acutely contemporary emotion.
The boundaries between fiction and reality are permeable throughout, with some shots juxtaposing actors against phone camera footage of the real life characters that they portray. For the most part, it works very effectively, although the snippets of real life phone footage are a little distracting, jolting us out of the nervy chokehold of the story.
If The Voice of Hind Rajab opens one hitherto blinkered eye, or ear, to the atrocities in Gaza, it will have done its job. But it’s a blunt and discomfiting instrument.