DAN WEBSTER:
No one who possesses even an ounce of humanity likes war. This is true no matter the cause. In the end no one ever really wins, and it’s the innocents who wind up suffering the most.
One of those innocents was a 5-year-old girl named Hind Rajab. And she is the focus of one of the 2026 Oscar nominees for Best International Film titled, simply enough, The Voice of Hind Rajab.
Directed by Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, The Voice of Hind Rajab is a hybrid blend of narrative and documentary cinema. Based on real events that took place on Jan. 29th, 2024, the film melds dramatized scenes featuring professional actors with tapes of young Rajab’s actual voice. And the effect is both powerful and heartbreaking.
It was on Jan. 29th that Rajab and six members of her family got trapped in the midst of an Israeli military operation. As they attempted to flee their neighborhood in Gaza City, the car they were riding in was fired on by an Israeli tank. Five of Rajab’s relatives died immediately, while another died a short while later, leaving Rajab alone in the demolished car.
Rather than portray the scene itself, Ben Hania centers her film in the office of the Palestine Red Crescent Society, a humanitarian group based in the West Bank city of Ramallah. The organization provides emergency medical and ambulance services to the West Bank, East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip.
It is in the Red Crescent headquarters that a volunteer dispatcher, Omar (played by Motaz Malhees) answers a phone call from a man in Germany. The man says that his brother and his family have had trouble leaving Gaza City and need help. Omar then calls a number that the man provides and a young voice answers, propelling Omar—and indeed his whole office—into a crisis.
Despite the fact that in reality the Red Crescent volunteers were on the phone with the girl for more than three hours, Ben Hania telescopes the time frame so that, dramatically, the film captures the essence of what occurred within the film’s 89-minute running time.
Much of that is taken up with Omar, who is sitting some 50 kilometers from Gaza City, being counseled to keep calm by his supervisor Rana (played by Saja Kilani). That isn’t easy for him to do, though, as he tries desperately to arrange a rescue operation. The problem is that his colleague Mahdi (played by Amer Hlehel) must coordinate with several groups—including the Gaza Health Ministry and the Israeli Army—to get safe clearance for an ambulance to enter the area. And this takes time, if it can be done at all.
But it is Omar, and then Rana, who must listen as Rajab—frightened as anyone would be, especially a child—cries for her mother. She is afraid, night is coming on and she begs for someone to come get her. Listening to all this is the kind of emotional torture that would break anyone’s soul.
Ben Hania deserves credit for being able to capture all this in the space of two rooms and a balcony. Much of what energy the film has comes from the closeups she uses of the Red Crescent principals (all of whom are based on the real people, as we see at the film’s end).
The Israeli government has criticized Ben Hania’s film, claiming that no Israeli troops were in the area at the time. But independent investigations by a number of organizations, including The Washington Post and the United Nations, have reported otherwise.
Even though the film received a 95 percent positive rating on the Rotten Tomatoes critical site, at least one critic faulted Ben Hania for using Rajab’s real voice. The New York Times’s Ben Kenigsberg wrote, “there is something uneasy-making about turning a child’s harrowing cries for help into a pretext for metacinematic flourishes” —whatever that is supposed to mean.
As news reports make clear, there was no happy outcome for Rajab nor for the two Red Crescent ambulance drivers who tried to save her. “Metacinematic” or not, what Ben Hania has given us is a powerful statement about how the horrors of war prey on mere children and how those who volunteer to face those horrors strive to do so with their humanity fully intact.
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio.