Cast: Saja Kilani, Motaz Malhees, Amer Hlehel, Clara Khoury
Genre: Drama
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania
In Irish Cinemas: Now
A child’s distress call becomes the centre of a film that offers no distance, no relief, and no escape from reality. The Voice of Hind Rajab documents an attempted rescue that unfolds in real time, placing the viewer inside a catastrophe unfolding in Gaza.
Judging a work like this by conventional cinematic standards almost feels beside the point. The film does not seek to entertain or even persuade; it bears witness. Built from authentic audio recordings and restrained reenactments, it reconstructs a moment from January 2024, when staff at the Palestinian Red Crescent answered a phone call from a five-year-old girl trapped alone in a car amid active gunfire. From the outset, the film makes clear that the rescue will fail. What follows is an unfiltered immersion into the final minutes of a child’s life.
The audio of Hind Rajab’s calls spread rapidly online after her death, briefly piercing global consciousness before being swallowed by the scale of violence inflicted on Gaza following October 7, 2023, a campaign that has left tens of thousands of children dead. Director Kaouther Ben Hania, previously recognised for The Man Who Sold His Skin, makes a deliberate and devastating choice: Hind herself is never depicted onscreen. Instead, the film confines itself almost entirely to the Red Crescent operations room in the West Bank, where dispatchers try to keep a terrified child calm while navigating a maze of permissions, delays, and military coordination.
Because Hind’s real voice is preserved over an hour of recordings, the emotional impact is immediate and overwhelming. As the details emerge, the horror deepens: she is the sole survivor in a vehicle filled with the bodies of her family. The film oscillates between genres without trying to; at times it resembles a survival horror, at others a procedural thriller, as operators race against time to secure a route for an ambulance while dealing with Israeli military intermediaries.
Not every creative decision lands perfectly. A brief sequence that overlays documentary footage with dramatised scenes risks drawing the focus to the mechanics of the reconstruction itself. And the film makes little attempt at tonal balance or ambiguity. It is relentless by design, emotionally exhausting, and unflinchingly direct, a quality that may make it unbearable for some viewers.
Yet this is precisely why the film matters. It functions not merely as cinema, but as testimony. In the context of what international bodies have described as genocidal violence, The Voice of Hind Rajab preserves a single life, a single voice, against erasure. It asks nothing quietly and offers no comfort. It simply asks whether we are prepared to hear what happened and to sit with that knowledge.
Few films reach this level of raw power. By merging documentary truth with stark reenactment, it delivers an experience that is emotionally pulverising and impossible to dismiss.
Overall: 8.5/10
Movie Reviewer
