The Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania broke through via the festival circuit with her 2023 feature Four Daughters, a drama-documentary hybrid that sought to give a fuller picture of the circumstances whereby two young women were inspired to flee their family home and run off with ISIS. Glowing reports from first responders helped land it a theatrical run, where this viewer was mostly struck by the film's determination to tie itself and the viewer up in knots: it wasn't by any definition pure documentary, but neither did it make for especially satisfying fiction. (It did, in its roundabout fashion, get to some understanding of the muddle the world and its people are in nowadays.) In longshot, The Voice of Hind Rajab appears exactly the kind of commercially-minded consolidation emergent arthouse directors are now expected to make second time around. In its form, this is a command-room procedural drama-slash-thriller, with the call-centre operatives of the Palestinian Red Crescent's West Bank station racing against time to rescue a six-year-old girl trapped in a car that now contains the bodies of her just-deceased aunt, uncle and cousins, having been pinned down at a gas station by Israeli tank fire. There is, however, a formal complication that carries us back in the direction of Four Daughters: the cries for help we hear coming through the phone jockeys' headsets are those of the actual Hind Rajab, a real-life six-year-old who here serves as a representative of the estimated 20,000 children killed by Israeli forces in the march to reduce Gaza to rubble and then a Trump-endorsed holiday and tourism resort. Ben Hania obtained permission from Hind's mother to repurpose the call, and now - as that title indicates - the voice of Hind Rajab has been given renewed prominence over everything else around it; the now Oscar-nominated movie that bears this name, produced by Brad Pitt's Plan B shingle, is a loudhailer upgrade of the call centre's speaker systems, constructed to carry these particular cries and wails around the globe in extra-thumping, extra-damning Dolby surround.
It is, then, a tricky one to have to assess, think and write about: a film that is, in some essential respect, inseparable from a cause. The sense the usual rules of cinematic engagement don't apply is only heightened by the fact that, on its current UK release, The Voice of Hind Rajab is being preceded by a prerecorded message from Ben Hania herself, on the set of her next project, apologising for not being with us in person (were we expecting her?), thanking us for coming to see the film, and urging us to tell our friends and loved ones about it - an intervention that risks coming across as either special pleading or directorial insecurity that the film won't entirely speak for itself. (The last time we got an intro like this it was Spielberg ahead of The Fabelmans, apparently stricken by uncertainty around releasing a personal project in the aftermath of Covid.) In fact, Voice does succeed in carrying and projecting a certain amount of critical information. The film's procedural drama makes a point of how hard it was to get into and out of the Gaza of January 2024, and how hard it was for Gazans to communicate with the outside world. The initial call comes from a relative in Germany, alerting the Red Crescent to a possible tragedy in their midst; when they make contact with Hind, the line's prone to dropping out and not great at the best of times, because the Israeli army have jammed comms to some degree; and dispatching an ambulance proves a challenge in itself, given that the Red Crescent required Israeli clearance to proceed, and their drivers were navigating streets bombed beyond all previous recognition. Any urgency is further stymied by the need to nudge requests up the chain of command: here, Ben Hania begins to recreate within this humdrum office space the kind of asymmetrical warfare going on outside, pitting heroes who feel obliged to do the right thing - to follow the rulebook - against an enemy busy killing without compunction. The call-centre workers are in some way surrogates for those of us in the audience: they're hearing what we're hearing, trying to piece this situation together; they, too, are at a potentially fatal remove from the action; they too react with horror and tears. In the meantime, all they can do is discuss among themselves, and here again Voice circles back to the perilously talky Four Daughters.
To some extent, what we're being asked to review here isn't a film or a story, rather a tape. The tape is important, in that it holds both proof of life and evidence of possible, prosecutable war crimes; so long as it keeps running, we know Hind Rajab is still alive. But a transcript isn't a script, and here's where one might begin to question some of Ben Hania's methods and choices. The Red Crescent workers have time to talk, such was the on-the-ground impasse of Gaza at this point, yet once the initial scene-setting info has been obtained, there's very little more that the protagonists can say. They can keep Hind talking, which is proof of some humanity; they can ask her to describe developments (thereby putting images in our head that this largely deskbound film cannot show), say a prayer and carry out breathing exercises. But they can't, ultimately, keep her from harm; the satisfying progression of the command-room drama is here replaced by gridlock, snafu and circumlocution, recasting characters who'd conventionally be can-do heroes as passive, can't-do eavesdroppers. More problematic is how Ben Hania confirms our standing as mere observers. At the film's climax, one aid worker's hand is seen to puncture the frame, clutching cellphone footage of the scene in the actual call centre on January 29, 2024. I think it's been put there to underline the verisimilitude of Ben Hania's re-enactment - it's the pixellated equivalent of those photos she inserts in the closing credits to highlight the real aid workers - but as has so often been the case during this conflict, we're really just left looking at a phone and frowning. Voice is a simpler undertaking than Four Daughters: if you can't conceive of the tens of thousands killed in Gaza, Ben Hania proposes, here's one life, held in the balance over ninety minutes. And if you need your cinema to make you feel something for it to be considered successful, Voice is inarguably that. The primary feeling it instilled in me, however, was a very familiar powerlessness. Whether it was consoling invention or not, the hijacked passengers of Paul Greengrass's United 93 finally got to fight back against those who'd been terrorising them. The question Ben Hania's film trails in its wake is altogether more troubling, not to mention doomerist: if committed professionals not an hour away from the scene with connections coming out of their ears couldn't do anything to halt the Israeli war machine as it bore down on a defenceless innocent, what hope do you or I have?
The Voice of Hind Rajab is now showing in selected cinemas.
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