We often call confrontational cinema hard to watch. Kaouther Ben Hania reminds us that some films are hard to listen to. At the center of The Voice of Hind Rajab is a small, unadorned voice that cuts like a siren in fog. It belongs to Hind Rajab, a 5 year old Palestinian girl who called the Palestine Red Crescent Society for help on January 29, 2024, after her family’s car was shelled in Gaza. Her final pleas, preserved across roughly seventy minutes of audio, anchor the film with a force that no dramatization could match.
Ben Hania builds an audacious hybrid around this recording. Viewers who know her Oscar nominated Four Daughters will recognize the method. The original phone calls play nearly in full, while actors embody the Red Crescent workers who field them. The action never leaves the beigely neutral call center. That choice traps us in the same anxious remove as the volunteers who can only talk, map, and wait while a child on the other end of the line breathes faster and faster.
The effect is merciless and bracing. The archival audio carries its own terrible gravity, and the film makes us sit with it, ears pried open, with no pause button and no escape hatch. Whether the fictional frame adds or distracts will spark debate. At times the scripted material leans into high stress thriller rhythms in the spirit of The Guilty. Nothing written can equal the naked power of Hind’s voice, and there are moments when the dramatization risks gilding what does not need gilding.
Even so, the immediacy is undeniable. DP Juan Sarmiento G. shoots in widescreen that prowls the maze of glass dividers and low desks, a choreography of swivels and glances that amplifies the claustrophobia. Real calls from the Red Crescent archives flood the room. Digital maps trace slow moving ambulances through cratered streets. The panic feels procedural, not sensational, and the sound design keeps folding the outside catastrophe into this fluorescent bunker.
Within that bunker the film sketches a trio who embody duty, compassion, and protocol. Mataz Malhees’s Omar first picks up Hind’s call and flounders under the weight of it. Saja Kilani’s Rana steadies the conversation with gentle focus. Amer Hlehel’s supervisor Mahdi keeps pushing the request up the chain while the clock erodes. Their arguments about rules versus conscience may be loud and sometimes blunt, yet the rawness matches the moment. When life and death hinge on a green light that never comes, there is little room for elegance.
Ben Hania is not interested in even handed distance. This is a work of witness and alarm. The editing surges, the score rises, and the rhetoric can be overt. For some, that directness will feel like a pressure tactic. For me, the formal intensity serves a devastating moral clarity. The film refuses to dilute what we are hearing, and it denies us the comfort of cutting away.
Industry heavyweights like Jonathan Glazer, Joaquin Phoenix, and Alfonso Cuarón have signed on as executive producers, and it is easy to see why. The film is both a howl and a record, and it arrives while the crisis it depicts is still ongoing. If it opens even one closed ear to what is happening in Gaza, it has done something vital.
I walked out shaken, silent, and grateful that the film exists. Quibbles about the hybrid approach feel small beside the experience of that voice traveling across a room full of ringing phones and unreadable maps. The Voice of Hind Rajab is a blunt instrument, yes, but also a necessary one. For me it stands among the strongest films at Venice this year.