The Voice of Hind Rajab                5 stars

One of the most important films of 2025 must be The Voice of Hind Rajab, written and directed by Kaouther Ben Hania of Tunisia. She heard of an incident that happened in Gaza in January 2024 where during the war, a six-year-old girl named Hind Rajab was killed by the IDF. The manner of her death was most harrowing. For hours she was trapped inside a car with the dead bodies of family members and was in telephone contact with volunteers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society. The volunteers tried frantically to get an ambulance to her while dealing with the bureaucratic nightmare of messages being passed to the Red Cross, then the IDF Cogat, then to the IDF in Gaza and back again. Ben Hania chose to represent the events by confining the action to the call center in Ramallah where four actors played the roles of the volunteers who were on the phone with the girl and with the government agencies. She chose not to represent Hind Rajab with an actor but instead used the actual audio recordings of her voice as part of the movie. The results are some of the most intense moments I can remember seeing on the screen. The three volunteers, Rana, Omar and Nisreen go from frantic to reassuring as they deal with the frustration of the situation but also try to keep the child calm in the face of danger, while Mahdi is trying to relay the urgency of the danger to the bureaucrats on the line. The scenes are gut-wrenching as we hear Hind Rajab’s small voice describing the terror around her but also calm as the volunteers try to reassure her that help is coming. But, alas, it never comes. The movie was honored with a nomination for the Best International Academy Award. I recall one other movie with a similar setup, limiting the action to a call center with voices on the phone, that being The Guilty, in 2018. That one though was entirely fictional, but still equally dramatic. I recommend The Voice of Hind Rajab if you are up for something this intense.