The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025)
- General info
- Available formats
- Synopsis:
- In late January 2024, workers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society receive an emergency call from a young girl in Gaza. As the tragic events of the day unfold, they race to save her, all the while following the strictures of a complex protocol. Ben Hania's (Four Daughters) film is an urgent and compassionate portrait of an avoidable tragedy, featuring the filmmaker's characteristic blend of documentary and fiction.
- Actors:
- Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Clara Khoury, Amer Hlehel
- Directors:
- Kaouther Ben Hania
- Producers:
- Karim Ahmad, Samar Akrouk, Badie Ali, Hamza Ali, Sawsan Asfari, Farhana Bhula, Lina Chaabane Menzli, Nadim Cheikhrouha, Alfonso Cuarón, Geralyn White Dreyfous, Dede Gardner
- Writers:
- Kaouther Ben Hania
- Aka:
- La voz de Hind
- Genres:
- Action & Adventure, Drama
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Reviews (1) of The Voice of Hind Rajab
Unforgettable Call, Uneasy Line - The Voice of Hind Rajab review by griggs
You don’t really watch this so much as sit there with your stomach clenched. Kaouther Ben Hania builds The Voice of Hind Rajab around the real emergency calls of a five-year-old girl trapped in a car in Gaza, pinning us in a single, airless dispatch centre as Red Crescent staff try to keep her talking and get help to her. When her small voice calmly repeats her name and location, it’s awful in the plainest sense.
As filmmaking, it’s impressively tight. The real-time structure mostly holds, the performances feel genuinely frayed, and the sound design does much of the work: phones crackling, drones overhead, distant shelling you can’t see but can’t tune out either.
What lingers, though, is unease. Turning a child’s final calls into a high-end pressure-cooker thriller is powerful, but also queasy. I’m not sure it quite earns the right to be this suspenseful, even if it makes sure Hind is impossible to forget.