The Voice of Hind Rajab
The movie I found myself continuing to think about while watching Kaouther Ben Hania’s heartbreaking docu-drama was Paul Greengrass’s “United 93.” While that film also had us on the plane with the passengers whose lives ended that fateful day, some of my most enduring memories of that film were of the people in the flight control centers who were helpless to do anything. With the way writer-director Ben Hania frames the film, that helplessness is the movie, but we also find ourselves furious at the bureaucracy that can get in the way when lives are at stake. Would the end result have been different had they been able to get an ambulance to Hind Rajab earlier? Possibly, but also it could have resulted in the same thing happening. We will never know.
Back in 2016, Michael Bay made a movie about the security team who defended the American embassy in Benghazi. That movie aimed for something akin to “United 93,” but its obvious political motivations- and Bay’s overstylized visual pallet- did it no favors dramatically. One of the smartest choices Ben Hania makes in her film- one that Greengrass also made- was to not deal with the larger political issues surrounding the most recent Israeli-Gaza conflict that began after the October 7 attacks by Hamas. The conflict is a backdrop, but we do not get characters railing about it, even as we experience a perspective of one of its most heartbreaking incidents.
We find ourselves in the call center for the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, an emergency aid organization that helps coordinate rescue and emergency vehicles into Gaza and the West Bank. They receive a call from an uncle in Germany, who is trying to help get aid for their 6-year-old niece, who is trapped in a car that is under fire in Gaza. The volunteers try to keep her on the line while coordinating getting an ambulance to her. When they’re unable to is when the tension really ramps up.
Ben Hania does not show us Hind Rajab, the 6-year-old, throughout any of this film’s 89 minutes except in photographs shared to the volunteers. The voice we hear is hers, from the PRCS’s actual calls with her. The actors playing the volunteers who take those calls are all superb in getting to the various anxieties they each face during the situation. The coordinator, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), who is hamstrung by procedure. Two of the dispatches, Omar (Motaz Malhees) and Rana (Saja Kilani), whom are the ones trying to keep Hind Rajab on the line. And Nisreen (Clara Khoury) is the supervisor who is trying to keep everyone calm during a decidedly anxious time. The tension in the film is built on these people’s faces, as they try to coordinate a situation that requires a lot of trust from others, but is not assured of success even when the green light is given.
Hind Rajab’s death is one of the most horrific in the years after October 7, and is seen as indicative of the cruel loss of life when it comes to Palestinian children in the bloodshed since that day. Ben Hania does not exploit her death, and in doing so, forces us to reckon with it, and empathize with the people who tried to prevent it. This is a staggering film.
