We might simply call it a dilemma, but Hollywood screenwriters call it a “crisis decision”, or maybe sometimes a “swivel”. It’s when there’s an impossible choice, in movies sublime or ridiculous, whether it’s Rick choosing between Ilsa and beating the Nazis in Casablanca, or – in the latter category – pointless superheroes choosing between a baby and the entire globe in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Yet the crisis decision to end them all occurs a long way from Hollywood in The Voice of Hind Rajab, a brisk, unbearably fraught dramatisation of an emblematic event in the Gaza war – when a six-year-old was trapped in a bullet-riddled car, penned in by Israeli tanks, as Red Crescent rescuers tried to organise her relief. To send an ambulance into the hell of northern Gaza would likely be suicidal; to do nothing would mean the slow death of the girl.
You may remember the voice tapes of the brave, desperate child talking to the emergency responders on a phone she had in the car: the audio was released almost in real time during the incident of January 2024. And this film uses the girl’s original audio in copious amounts from start to finish, with the actors playing against it – intrusive and controversial though that may sound.
The chamber-piece movie, which is like having your chest trapped in a claw for 90 minutes, takes place within a few dozen square metres of a Red Crescent call centre in Ramallah on the West Bank. The emergency responders patch themselves through to the car just in time to overhear the death of a teenager inside. There are to be six dead in the vehicle: the teen, her parents and three other children – with the adults’ niece, Hind Rajab Hamada, hanging onto life and hanging on the line. (Hind’s mother was at home.)
The inexperienced, headstrong Omar (Motaz Malhees) is the call-centre guy who is first on the phone and quickly freaks out at the plight of the victims. Rana (Saja Kilani) is his supervisor who steadies him and joins him on the call – her serenity given even more of a workout later in the film. “I’m on my own,” says the tiny girl in the car. “Please don’t leave me.” When Rana tries to tell her that the others in the car are just having a sleep, Hind fires back: “I said they are dead! They’re all dead… There are only dead bodies.”
The clash at the heart of the piece is between Omar and the boss of the call centre, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel). There are two surviving ambulance men in that part of Gaza who could be rung up directly and sent to the scene pronto. But Mahdi has lost too many rescue workers like that: he insists on “co-ordination” – a dread word that will hang like the sword of Damocles over Hind.
It refers to a laborious process of going through intermediaries to persuade the IDF to stand aside, with messages passed back and forth through this Kafka-esque bureaucratic sludge for hours on end. Mahdi has the stare of a man whose soul has been plunged deep into a moral quagmire and who can only dimly see a way out.
An office-trashing bust-up between Omar and Mahdi, whether it was real or not, is the highly dramatic core that no doubt helped attract a flock of Hollywood types who boarded this project – Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Alfonso Cuaron and others. When they’re not fighting, Omar and Mahdi take themselves off down the hall for a quick burst of male re-bonding and (believe it or not) computer gaming while the women stay on the line – notably the unruffled therapist Nisreen (Clara Khoury), the final member of the outstanding quartet of principals who carry us through the searing ordeal.
The writer-director of this superb French-Tunisian production is Kaouther Ben Hania, an expert stylist who also probed the drama-documentary threshold in the Oscar-nominated Four Daughters (2023). Here, she shoots the claustrophobic events with Paul Greengrass-ish jittery intensity and busy differential focus. An audio waveform fills the screen for much of the phoning, and sometimes we hear the real-life taped voices of the call-centre workers played across the faces of the silent actors. In one scene, we see original phone video from that day in the office while the actors mime the same footage in the background.
Such devices pay appropriate tribute to the factual aspect without entirely freeing the film from charges of exploitation. News pictures of Hind’s mother, who blessed the project, is deployed to counter fears that weaving actuality of an atrocity into the race-against-time thriller genre doesn’t help anyone’s human rights.
Ultimately, you can’t easily get a good night’s sleep after hearing Hind’s small voice pleading time after time for people to “Come get me… there’s no one with me!” She’s by turns piteous, courageous, almost indignant. The name of her school is A Happy Childhood. Hours later, as night falls, she explains: “I’m afraid of the dark.” But, six years old or not, she’s growing up fast. Soon after, she calls out: “I’m dying.”
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