This is anear impossible film to review. In aworld flooded with propaganda and misinformation about the genocide in Gaza, Kaouther Ben Hania’s film speaks with radical honesty and its filmmaking merits feel of powerful consequence. Even setting aside its subject matter, it is an astounding feat of dramatising real events with an eye on the cinematic, yet it delivers such apunch to the heart that one hesitates to recommend it without qualification.
This was the debate Ifound myself in the moment the credits rolled. My grandmother, who at 91 still spends her weekends pounding the Yorkshire pavements to call for afree Palestine, phoned while my cheeks were still wet with post-screening tears. When Itold her about the film, she said she wanted to see it. Icould only reply that unless she was feeling particularly open to devastation, she must not. And yet, with time, my perspective has shifted. Iwould now urge anyone to watch this masterwork, because if people in Gaza can endure the atrocities of the IDF and still face the next day, the least we can do is confront art that represents their struggle.
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Coming from the extraordinarily talented Ben Hania, whose last two films – the political drama The Man Who Sold His Skin and experimental documentary Four Daughters – both earned Oscar nominations, this story blends the two and unfolds on acold January day in Palestine. The offices of the Palestine Red Crescent ambulance service in the West Bank receive acall: acar carrying afamily in North Gaza is under siege. Before long, the vehicle is riddled with 355 bullets and afive-year-old girl named Hind Rajab is the sole survivor. For hours she pleads for an ambulance while trapped among the corpses of her family. The nearest one is just eight minutes away but it cannot move into the restricted zone without clearance from the IDF – the very forces who have just slaughtered Hind’s lovedones.
For those who followed the news at the time, the outcome is known. But to watch it play out under Ben Hania’s gaze is to experience an agonising spiral into the darkest depths. Even aterrified little girl, whispering into the phone and begging not to be left alone in the dark, becomes atarget of adepraved military machine. Part of the film’s unbearable power is its immediacy – these events happened in early 2024. In years to come, the sadism inflicted on Hind may come to be remembered as part of aturning point in ahistorical arc that bends towards moral goodness, amoment that forced the world to eventually confront the horrors of Gaza’s genocide, but in the present it feels that such cruelty has only become more normalised, and Ben Hania does not allow distance or detachment.
In aformal sense, The Voice of Hind Rajab is extraordinary – superbly acted, beautifully shot and shaped and edited with rare urgency. But its purpose is not primarily aesthetic. It is testimony – unflinching and deliberate – backed by afilmmaking elite that includes Joaquin Phoenix, Jonathan Glazer and Brad Pitt among its many executive producers. Hind Rajab’s story is almost too terrible to face, yet this film demands we bear witness.