Venice: Oscar Contender "The Voice of Hind Rajab"

by Elisa Giudici

THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB © Venice Film Festival

Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania has always worked at the intersection of personal tragedy and political urgency. From The Man Who Sold His Skin to Four Daughters, she has shown a capacity to merge documentary impulses with bold formal invention. Yet with The Voice of Hind Rajab (the film that left Venice audiences openly sobbing halfway through its screening) she has taken that approach further, venturing into a space where cinema becomes almost unbearable.

The story is simple and shattering. On January 29, 2024, five-year-old Hind Rajab was trapped inside her family’s car in Gaza, surrounded by the corpses of her relatives and encircled by Israeli tanks...

For seventy minutes, she remained on the phone with the Red Crescent, her voice shifting from the belief that her parents were asleep to the realization that they were dea and that her own death was imminent. “Come quickly, I’m afraid of the dark,” she begged. Those words, ordinary, banal, every child’s fear, now echo as one of the most haunting refrains in recent cinema.

Hind’s plea is heartbreakingly ordinary: she asks not to be left alone in the dark. No commentary could equal the force of that single detail. If those words had been written for an actress, they would almost certainly have felt manipulative, one of those calculated lines designed to wring tears from the audience. The fact that they come instead from Hind herself, her real voice, trembling and insistent, absolves the film from that charge before it can even be made. It is precisely this authenticity that makes the sequence so devastating.

And yet, it would be disingenuous to pretend that <em>The Voice of Hind Rajab</em> cannot feel overwhelming, even excessive, in its emotional register. The tears of the actors, the raw grief they embody as they listen to the child’s voice, and the sobs it elicited in Venice can strike some viewers as heavy-handed, bordering on manipulative. That is a legitimate response. Several English critics, for instance, reacted negatively to the film, finding it overbearing. Perhaps it clashes with a certain cultural expectation of understatement; perhaps it simply overwhelms.

I understand that reaction, because I have felt it myself with other films. I remember recoiling from the Oscar-nominated Lebanese drama Capernaum with a similar visceral rejection, convinced that the manipulation was too stark. I expected to have the same resistance here, but I didn’t. Not entirely, at least. Part of that is the sheer force of the material itself, which is powerful in its own right and does not need cinematic ornament to move us. Ben Hania may not always seem fully equal to the story she has in her hands (the material outpaces her, at times) but she handles it with an undeniable delicacy and care. Even if one questions the balance, it is clear she has approached Hind’s story not with exploitation but with an effort to honor it.

The film itself moves in a liminal space between fiction and documentary. Hind’s authentic recordings are paired with performances by actors portraying the Red Crescent team in Ramallah, who spent hours trying to reach her that night. Their dialogues, sometimes didactic, reconstruct the bureaucratic nightmare of rescue protocols: an ambulance needing permission from the Palestinian Ministry of Health, then from the International Red Cross, then from the Israeli army—the very forces that had just riddled the Hamadeh family car with 350 bullets. The absurdity is laid bare with drawings on transparent boards, with the actors tracing step by step how each authorization delayed Hind’s rescue. At times this feels pedantic, but it is also precise: the mechanics of cruelty, mapped out in real time.

And then comes the film’s most unforgettable image, the one that secures its place among the year’s most indelible cinematic moments. An off-screen arm appears, holding a smartphone that films the actors. On the phone’s screen, their faces blur into those of the actual Red Crescent responders, drawn from livestreams broadcast that very night in a desperate attempt to pressure authorities into allowing an ambulance through. It is not the most polished shot of the year (technically it borders on crude) but for sheer inventiveness, for the way it collapses the space between documentation and reenactment, it may be the single most memorable image Venice audiences will take away from this edition. A line dissolves before our eyes: cinema folds into journalism, fiction into evidence.

To focus purely on craft would miss the point, and yet it is fair to say <em>The Voice of Hind Rajab</em> is formally rough, shaped by urgency rather than polish. It does not redefine cinematic language, but it pushes close, precisely because of the immediacy of its material and the director’s courage in handling it without filters.

It is not the first time real-life tragedy has been woven into film, but usually such works arrive with distance, offering reflection after events have settled into history. Here the gap collapses: the film does not just respond to the present—it is the present, even as another Hind may at this very moment be calling for help. There is no ideology, no overt political thesis, just the unbearable clarity of a child’s voice in the dark.

That is why, more than any other film in Venice this year, <em>The Voice of Hind Rajab</em> felt destined for the Golden Lion. Not only because of the weight of its subject, but because Ben Hania has turned that unbearable story into cinema that is both intimate and universal, fragile and unrelenting. A film that is almost too much to bear, and yet impossible to turn away from.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is Tunisia's Oscar submission (and likely to be a real contender) and is currently seeking US distribution.

Comments

[huzaifa sinan]

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