“A gripping drama that doesn’t set the world of cinema on fire, even if it is indeed about a part of the world that is sadly still under fire.”

“Come get me, please!”

The genocide in Gaza knows countless harrowing stories. Many of them haven’t reached Western ears and eyes, but on January 29, 2024, the genocide got a face and a voice. Hind Rajab, a five-year-old Palestinian girl trapped in a shot-up car, was contacted by the Red Crescent emergency center through an uncle. What followed was an hours-long attempt to get clearance from the Israeli army to save her. It wasn’t to be. At 19:30 that evening all contact was lost after an ambulance, coming out to extract her, was bombed mere meters away. Hind’s story was an important step in opening Western eyes to the hell that Israel was (and still is) creating in Gaza.

Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania took Hind’s story to create a dramatization of the gruelling and frustrating hours at the Red Crescent emergency center through the eyes of four people trying to save the girl on the other end of the line: phone operators Omar (Motaz Malhees) and Rana (Saja Kilani), coordinator Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), and psychologist Nisreen (Clara Khoury). Using real audio fragments of their conversations, The Voice of Hind Rajab pieces together the girl’s final hours, but is primarily a portrait of the tireless heroics of the faceless men and women trying to save lives on a daily basis, and a tribute to those who risk their own lives to save others.

What starts as an ordinary day for Omar, as far as there are any at the Red Crescent call center, takes a dramatic turn when he receives a call from Germany. The man on the other end of the line says he has been in contact with his niece, trapped somewhere in Gaza. Omar manages to establish contact with the girl, who after some prodding gives her full name: Hind Rami Iyad Rajab. With the help of his coordinator Mahdi, Omar is quickly able to geolocate the girl’s position in the Al-Hawa neighborhood of Northern Gaza, shortly before it is taken over by the IDF. It is the start of hours of frustration, despair, and helplessness that take a big emotional toll on Omar and his co-worker Rana, who alternate in keeping the line to the girl open. Hind is not alone in the car, but her uncle, aunt, and four cousins are all dead. “They are just sleeping,” Rana emphasizes, hoping to keep the girl calm. She’s only five years old, but when you grow up in Gaza you learn quickly what death looks like; she isn’t fooled. The matter-of-factness of her “They’re all dead” cuts through the heart. Tempers flare high as Omar gets frustrated with Mahdi, who is bound by protocol to get a safe route approved by the IDF through the Red Cross and the Israeli boots on the ground. Both their positions are understandable: Omar wants to try everything in his power to save Hind, while Mahdi does not want to risk the death of the ambulance workers, lest there be nobody left to save anybody in Gaza.

Taking a real story, and especially a high-profile one like Hind Rajab’s, will always invite discussions about exploitation. Ben Hania’s decision to use the actual audio from the conversations between Hind and the people at Red Crescent certainly doesn’t diminish that idea, but once settled into the film the fact that Hind is ‘just’ a voice tends to create an abstraction and shifts the focus fully onto the people on the other end of the conversation. At times their real voices are used, while in other moments it’s the actors speaking their words. The performances are all completely believable, even if everything outside the phone calls is a dramatization of the events at the center. Understandably emotions run high, but for most of its runtime this is not some manipulative and cheap weepy. The handheld cinematography heightens the urgency of the situation; its approach in this sense is not so different from Kathryn Bigelow’s A House of Dynamite, which played the day before. The stakes in Bigelow’s film are probably higher, but the stakes in The Voice of Hind Rajab are real.

So, is the film exploitative? For a good deal of its 90-minute runtime the honesty and measured approach, even if hitting all the feels for the audience, keep it from milking the tragedy. It is only in the last ten minutes, when footage of the real rescue workers and of Hind’s mother is shown, as well as the aftermath of the attack on the ambulance and the car Hind Rajab was trapped in, that Ben Hania crosses the line into the film’s intentions ringing false. Up to those moments the film is an honest re-telling of the events, the only niggle being some of the speechifying about Israeli soldiers’ evil doings, which has a truth to it but doesn’t feel like organic dialogue.

The better question is to ask whether making a film like The Voice of Hind Rajab is ethically or morally defensible. This will differ from viewer to viewer, and shouldn’t affect a person’s perception of the quality of the film and its cinematic merit. When it comes to cinema Ben Hania keeps it modest, employing a typical social realist approach that stays close to the four main players; wide shots are rare, and the only flights of fancy she allows are a visual layer with soundwaves superimposed over the actors if the audio sticks to the actual voices of Omar or Rana. In that sense, the film is cinematically flat, but exactly what the subject matter called for. Comparing to Bigelow’s films is perhaps not the best reference point; something like Paul Greengrass’s United 93, another re-enactment about a real-life tragedy, is a better touchstone. Greengrass’s film is more tense, edge-of-your-seat stuff, but works in much the same way as Ben Hania’s film. One could even contend that the acting in The Voice of Hind Rajab, in particular by Malhees and Kilani, leaves a stronger impression; the film is destined to win something bigger on Saturday, going by the reactions at the press screenings alone, but both actors would make worthy Volpi Cup winners. Whether the film as a whole has the goods to nab the top prize is another matter. There are certainly more audacious projects on the Lido when it comes to cinematic quality, but there is no denying that the film’s political angle works in its favor, which could push it over the edge. On its own merit, The Voice of Hind Rajab is a gripping drama that doesn’t set the world of cinema on fire, even if it is indeed about a part of the world that is sadly still under fire.