Why The Voice of Hind Rajab is the film the world can no longer look away from

I often ponder how soon is too soon when it comes to filmmakers fictionalising tragic historical events. Both World Trade Center and United 93 arrived five years after the 9/11 attacks in New York. Hotel Mumbai came ten years after the 2008 Mumbai attack.

Now we have The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther Ben Hania's searing docudrama about the final moments of the eponymous Palestinian girl, just 18 months after Israeli forces extinguished her life.

The dust has barely settled on the harrowing event that took place on January 29, 2024. Ramallah-based volunteers of the Red Crescent, a humanitarian organisation providing aid to Muslim countries, pleaded for hours for six-year-old Hind to be rescued from a car under heavy military fire.

Israeli snipers had already claimed the lives of her uncle, aunt and four cousins and were waiting to pick off the defenceless Hind too.

It's an uneasy dramatisation that in the wrong hands could easily be labelled indecorous, but with Kaouther at the helm, and Hind's mother's blessing, it's nothing short of an urgent, empathetic articulation of humanity at its best and at its worst.

A relentless gut punch

The Tunisian director is no stranger to telling emotionally wrenching stories situated within systemic structures of oppression.

Her 2017 drama Beauty and the Dogs details the struggle of a Tunisian woman trying to report her rape by police officers in the same buildings her attackers work in.

Then, 2023's Four Daughters, a vehement hybrid docu-fiction, zones in on the true story of a mother, with her youngest two daughters, who becomes an at-times unreliable narrator to the tumultuous personal and political history that led to her eldest daughters being radicalised by the Islamic State.

With The Voice of Hind Rajab, Kaouther takes a painstakingly reliable approach in her reconstruction of the hours before Hind's tragic death, detailing, too, the psychological toll on the Red Crescent volunteers striving to save lives during Israel's bombardment of Gaza and state-sanctioned violence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory that continues today.

In a bustling call centre, 50 miles from Gaza City, Kaouther introduces the volunteers smoking on a balcony of the building. It's an establishing motif that will ripple through the 90-minute film; workers will reach helplessly, angrily, for a cigarette, hoping the nicotine hit will provide some short-lived relief to the long-term despair of their gruelling efforts.

That is felt most potently with Omar A. Alqam (Motaz Malhees), a call dispatcher who loses his first caller. That caller's identity is initially unknown, so he's instructed to place a faceless image of them on a wall of remembrance with other lost souls.

Psychologist Nisreen Jeries Qawas (Clara Khoury) checks in with the despondent dispatcher. He takes a moment, but there is little time to grieve. When Omar returns to his desk, he receives the fateful call about Hind.

Omar, Nisreen and supervisor Rana Hassan Faqih (Saja Kilani) take turns speaking to the little girl over the phone. They ask questions about who she is and where she is from, offering comfort with reassurance and prayer from the Quran.

Meanwhile, the Red Crescent's head of disaster risk management, Amer Hlehel (Mahdi M. Aljamal), battles through bureaucracy and red tape to get an ambulance to her.

Amer and Omar often come to blows; the dispatcher questions why rescuers can't be sent, while Motaz, vibrating with rage, turns towards Mahdi's harried Amer, who has to make heavy decisions.

Does he risk the lives of his depleting ambulance workforce for one child or not? These are impossible choices that make the office a powder keg of emotions, portrayed by the actors with palpable sincerity.

Yet it is during the phone conversations involving the real-life recordings of Hind that a relentless gut punch is delivered. Not just for the staff, but for the audience too, flinching at the real sound of gunfire and studying the soundwaves of her innocent, terrified voice dancing across a computer screen, across the faces of the dispatchers, tying them together in this harrowing moment of history.

A child’s final cry remembered

The final scene seamlessly reconstructs the last efforts to save Hind's life once military approval is greenlit to send an ambulance in.

The perspective switches between the anxious actors and the phone footage of the real Red Crescent workers, holding onto hope as they intensely track the rescuers' course.

“I’m so scared, please come,” Hind begs. Paramedics did come, but they never made it. Twelve days after her final call, the ambulance was found destroyed, and Hind's body, along with her family's, were discovered in a car that had been shot at 335 times.

It's an end no less devastating than when the news went viral in 2024. Since then, thousands more children like Hind have been murdered or maimed by a terror state. Innocence lost, families broken, bloodlines ended.

The Voice of Hind Rajab could not have come sooner. It will forever serve as a cinematic record of the humane efforts of Palestinians and the inhumane barbarity of the Israeli regime – as the world just watched.

Hanna Flint is a British-Tunisian critic, broadcaster and author of Strong Female Character: What Movies Teach Us. Her reviews, interviews and features have appeared in GQ, the Guardian, Elle, Town & Country, Mashable, Radio Times, MTV, Time Out, The New Arab, Empire, BBC Culture and elsewhere

Follow her on Instagram: @hannainesflint