The last film from the respected Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania floored me: 2023’s Oscar-nominated Four Daughters, a docudrama that followed a grieving mother and her two youngest daughters in the filmmaker’s home country after their two elder sisters had fled the family to join Daesh in Libya. By turns magical and uplifting, and then harrowing and heartbreaking, it’s a low-key masterpiece.
Her follow-up, which just premiered at the Venice Film Festival, is no different: The Voice of Hind Rajab, a sensitive and meticulous retelling of a true story, following a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was trapped inside a car under fire in northern Gaza in January of 2024. Searing without ever being sensationalist, this film is a humanist marvel and, without a doubt, deserves this festival’s highest accolade.
Much like Four Daughters, The Voice of Hind Rajab blends reality and fiction with the utmost care. The film opens with the image of sound waves, a recurring motif throughout, and we’re told that the voice you’ll soon hear, of a child begging to be rescued, is actually Hind Rajab’s own. Ben Hania uses it with the blessing of Hind Rajab’s mother and the effect is horrifying in a way that no recreation could possibly achieve.
But before that, we meet the people we’ll actually be spending this film with: the volunteers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society in Ramallah, who received Hind’s call from many miles away. Based on real people but here played by actors, we see them goofing off during a break—formidable humanitarians who’ve seen and heard unimaginable things, but persist regardless with their mission to support suffering Gazans.
It’s the impassioned Omar (the brilliant Motaz Malhees) who first answers a call from a man in Germany who reports that he has family members attempting to flee Gaza City who are stuck in a car being shot at by an Israeli army tank. They manage to reach a woman in that car who seems to be killed as she’s speaking. Then they begin speaking to Hind.
Affectionately called Hanood, she tries her best to explain what happened. It’s truly staggering in these scenes to hear this little girl, in her real voice, try to piece together the last few moments of her life—the family members she was with, an uncle, aunt, and cousins, who are now corpses around her; the gunfire that still roars on; her thoughts of her mother at home and when she’ll see her again. When Omar’s colleague Rana (the equally impressive Saja Kilani) takes over, she uses a term of endearment to reassure Hanood, to which she, disorientated and tearful, replies: “Mommy?”
