The Voice of Hind Rajab: an emotionally devastating film that blurs the boundary between resistance and spectacle

Watching The Voice of Hind Rajab, I found myself returning to the ethical questions Jacques Rivette posed in his critique of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapo (1960), in which the death of Emmanuelle Riva’s Jewish camp prisoner is bathetically framed in the film’s infamous climactic tracking shot: the stark moment when representation risks aestheticising atrocity.

The same questions persist when examining the representation of Gaza on screen. Unlike the early Holocaust films, such as Alain Resnais’s 1956 documentary about Auschwitz and Majdanek Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard), which were driven by the moral imperative of remembrance and a vague quest for retribution, the handful of post-7 October Gaza pictures made before the current fragile ceasefire carry a more urgent purpose: to stop the bloodshed first and foremost, while drawing attention to the horrors of the colonial Israeli project.

In her seventh feature, the Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania seeks to iconise a five-year-old Palestinian girl who was murdered by the Israel Defence Forces in January 2024. Yet by embedding the real voice of a dead child within the constructed framework of a genre-inflected narrative, Ben Hania – who has received Oscar nominations for both fiction and documentary features – blurs the boundary between resistance and spectacle perilously.

Unfolding over the course of 24 hours, the film is set entirely within a dispatch office of the Palestinian Red Crescent Society (PRCS). A group of volunteers receives a panicked call from Rajab’s 15-year-old cousin, Layan Hamadeh, who tells them that they are trapped in a car by an IDF tank firing at them. When the line is abruptly cut off, the PRCS workers call back, only to be answered by a disoriented Rajab, who tells them that everyone in the vehicle her aunt, uncle and four cousins including Layan has been killed, and pleads for help. 

A cross between Gustav Möller’s emergency call-centre thriller The Guilty (2018) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s hospital-set No Way Out (1950), the film creates nail-biting tension as it charts the futile efforts of the dispatchers to save the trapped girl. Ben Hania dramatises the real events of the day while using the real unfiltered voice of Hind to anchor the action.

The bulk of the film focuses on the debilitating bureaucracy confronting the Palestinian workers a process that, in turn, exposes the inhumanity of the Israeli occupation and the impotence of Western humanitarian institutions. In that regard, Ben Hania’s politics are pointed and astute. She explicitly indicts the Israeli Defence Forces, depicting them as a sadistic, invisible predator preying on innocent civilians like Rajab and her family. She allows her characters to call Israeli rule what many Western commentators have refrained from acknowledging: an occupation. She underlines the truth that the roots of this carnage lie not necessarily in 7 October but in the long-standing occupation whose very architecture denies Palestinians a lifeline.

Rajab’s voice, however, remains the film’s most contentious element. The first 20 minutes are emotionally devastating, powered by Rajab’s nonplussed cadence: a trembling rhythm of confusion, helplessness and the half-comprehension of a mind straining to process a surreally malevolent reality. By the 30-minute mark, the shock of hearing the real voice of the dead child subsides, the initial tremor gradually dissipating an inevitable upshot of its overuse. Uneven performances – Motaz Malhees’s overblown outbursts, Saja Kilani’s studied earnestness – amplify the awkward incorporation of Rajab’s voice into a single-location thriller that partially employs the aural pleading of an invisible five-year-old both to reinforce its political message and to perfect the mechanisms of its plotting.

Hind’s voice is both the film’s emotional core and its most potent political weapon. But the film’s unmodulated use of the child’s calls leaves space only for enforced sympathy rather than reflective distance. However close to reality the setting may be, the aestheticisation of actual events through such a synthetic narrative ultimately denies Hind individuality. With nothing of the girl revealed beyond her photo and predicament, she is reduced much of the time to a mere voice – an echo of suffering.

In his final essay, in 1992, the critic Serge Daney returned to Rivette’s criticism of Kapo, comparing that film with Night and Fog: “Was Nuit et brouillard a ‘beautiful’ film? No, but it was just. It’s Kapo that wanted to be beautiful and wasn’t.”

► The Voice of Hind Rajab is in UK cinemas 16 January.