“The tank is next to me.” “They are shooting at me.” “Come get me. I’m all on my own.” Few films begin with lines this freighted with irrevocability. The Voice of Hind Rajab confronts us with the real voice of a five-year-old girl whose fate is already known, stripping cinema of suspense and replacing it with something far more devastating: certainty. If urgency in the narrative holds it together as a piece of cinema, it is inevitability that makes director Kaouther Ben Hania’s docudrama an impossibly heartbreaking affair.
The film is set inside the Palestine Red Crescent Society’s call centre in Ramallah on January 29, 2024. As the war between Israel and Palestine rages on, employees operate in a heightened emotional state, trained to respond to civilian SOS calls amid constant crisis. Omar (Motaz Malhees), Rana (Saja Kilani), Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), and Nisrine (Clara Khoury), the fictional leads, along with the late Hind Rajab’s real voice on a phone call, have guts of steel, but their hearts ache too, as do those of the viewers.
Ben Hania confines The Voice of Hind Rajab almost entirely to the call-centre floor, building its world through disembodied voices, interrupted signals, and institutional protocol. Hind, referred to as Hanood, remains unseen, yet the film achieves an unbearable visual clarity through sound alone: a stranded car, advancing armour, a child narrating her own extinction. For viewers fluent in Arabic, the exchanges cut deeper still, where linguistic nuance intensifies the contrast between terror and innocence.
The film is acutely observant without being demonstrative. A casual remark about naming a future daughter Hanood and a confession of months spent away from family sketch the psychic cost of humanitarian labour. Ben Hania allows emotional responses to register without excessive commentary. Male agents externalise rage, while women display grief with tears of devastation. This way, Omar and Rana, the first to take Hind’s call, become emotional anchors not through melodrama but through cumulative helplessness. Their differing reactions are not so much gendered commentary as variations of the same moral paralysis.
The Voice of Hind Rajab is not a film that rewards conventional critique of performance or dialogue. Juan Sarmiento G.’s handheld camerawork sustains an unnerving proximity, blurring the boundary between observation and participation. The editing by Qutaiba Barhamji, Maxime Mathis, and Ben Hania herself demonstrates extraordinary restraint, refusing structure, relief, or narrative release. Written by Ben Hania, the film is pointedly uncommercial and uninterested in balance or consolation. It documents a space the world largely prefers not to acknowledge.
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In a narrative that leads to an expectedly shocking finale, The Voice of Hind Rajab is a film that haunts long after it ends. It feels inhumane not to feel something when listening to a child’s plea to abandon everything and come save her. In these polarizing times, the most disturbing question it leaves behind is: “What would you have done if you were an ordinary Israeli soldier who knew it was a child in the car?”
Rating: ★★★★★
P.S.: The film was viewed on a FYC screener. The Voice of Hind Rajab is Tunisia’s official entry into the 98th Academy Awards in the Best International Film category. It opens theatrically in New York and Los Angeles on December 17th.
