January 29, 2024. Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call. A 6-year-old girl is trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue. While trying to keep her on the line, they do everything they can to get an ambulance to her. Her name was Hind Rajab.
Motaz Malhees
Amer Hlehel
Clara Khoury
The Ritz, Penzance
The Ritz, Penzance
Reviews
Thoughts
Every other film in this season lets the boundary between two people dissolve: in sleep, in grief, in desert heat. The Voice of Hind Rajab holds a phone line open across that boundary and cannot cross it.
Ben Hania keeps the camera inside the Palestine Red Crescent dispatch centre for the duration: no road, no car, no sky. What we get is a desk, a headset, colleagues catching each other's eye, a supervisor working the phones for a clearance, and a voice arriving through the receiver that is not a performance. Around that real recording, the actors playing the responders build everything live. It is the only unfabricated thing in the frame.
We open with it because it states the season's question in its most unforgiving form, and because it is the one film here that refuses the "dream" of the cinematic. Ben Hania has said she heard the recording and felt the child was asking her to come, and that she knew this was irrational, because it had already happened.
As well as deeply harrowing it is possibly the most hopeful film in a season about listening: it is fast, procedural, full of small human reflexes, and utterly clear that being heard and being saved are not the same thing.