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The Voice of Hind Rajab review: The docudrama about a Gaza tragedy leaving audiences 'distraught'

At this year's Venice Film Festival,sequencial poker no film has been more talked about than this latest project from Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, which recounts the heart-shattering story of a six-year-old girl killed in Gaza, and received a record 23-minute standing ovation at the festival this week.

It isn't uncommon to hear cheers or boos at the end of a film festival screening, but when The Voice of Hind Rajab was shown to journalists and industry professionals at the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, some far rarer sounds were heard. People were crying. Some of them were sobbing noisily, some were sniffling, some had red eyes, and almost everyone was too distraught to talk. The film is likely to prompt a similar response wherever it is shown. Later on in the day, at the festival premiere, it received what Deadline reported as a 23 minute-plus standing ovation, which it suggested may be a film festival record. It is now a hot favourite to pick up Venice's top prize, The Golden Lion, on Saturday, and it is almost certain to be nominated for the Academy Award for best international feature film.

Kaouther Ben Hania, the Tunisian director of The Voice of Hind Rajab, is no stranger to the Oscars, having been nominated in the best international feature category for The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020), and in the best documentary category for 2024's Four Daughters. But her latest work – which numbers Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Jonathan Glazer and Alfonso Cuarón among its executive producers – will have a greater impact than anything she has done before.

An innovative hybrid of drama and documentary, it recounts the heart-shattering story of Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed in the Israel-Gaza war in January 2024. She was travelling one afternoon in a car in Gaza's Tel al-Hawa neighbourhood with her aunt, uncle and cousins when the car was fired upon, and Hind was the only member of the family group to survive. She was then trapped for hours in the wreckage, squeezed against the bodies of her relatives, and hoping in vain to be rescued.

Clips of the phone conversations between the terrified girl and some Palestinian Red Crescent volunteers were circulated on social media. Now those same recordings have been used as the basis of Ben Hania's film. Actors play the volunteers, based on the real people involved, in its main setting, the offices of a Red Crescent emergency centre, 52 miles away from Gaza. But, as a caption explains, Hind's voice is the real thing. We are listening to actual phone calls made in January 2024. This means that the film has the atmosphere and structure of an immersive thriller about a feverish race against time. But the child's voice on the crackling line turns it into something much more distressing. "Please come get me," she pleads. "I'm scared." And because we are hearing Hind's voice, rather than that of an actress, we have the stomach-churning illusion that she can still be saved, even though we know that's impossible.

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The audio evidence of her bravery throughout her ordeal is devastating. But the volunteers' experiences are almost unbearable, too. Motaj Malhees is Oman, an inexperienced young man who makes contact with Hind. Saja Kilani plays his supervisor, who comforts the girl while holding back tears. Clara Khoury plays a counsellor who tries to keep her traumatised co-workers calm. And Amer Hlehel plays the supervisor with the nightmarish job of "co-ordination".

Director:?Kaouther Ben Hania

Cast:?Motaj Malhees, Saja Kilani, Jared Harris, Clara Khoury, Amer Hlehel

Run time:?1hr 29m

The awful irony, as the film depicts it, is that the Red Crescent has an ambulance available, just eight minutes' drive away from where Hind is hiding. But before it can be dispatched, the Israeli Army has to agree on a route through the rubble-strewn streets for it to follow. And as the Red Crescent can't contact the Army directly, negotiations have to be conducted via the Red Cross and other intermediaries. Ben Hania doesn't make any overt political statements, nor does she show how Hind was killed. The point is that the volunteers are too far away to see. What the film conveys so powerfully is the pain of wanting to change a situation which is agonisingly out of your hands.

As the minutes tick by and the pressure intensifies, the volunteers call everyone they can think of, try to come up with alternative plans, and veer between supporting each other and clashing. (These contrived-sounding arguments are Ben Hania's one obvious misjudgement?– the one jarring reminder that we aren't watching a fly-on-the-wall documentary.) But the team's most urgent task is to keep talking to Hind. Scrap by scrap, they tease out the details of her plight. Her class at school is called Butterfly, she says. Her school is called A Happy Childhood. There is a tank near the car, and it is getting closer.

If viewers aren't deeply upset by this point in the film, they will be by the end. In its final minutes, The Voice of Hind Rajab switches completely from dramatisation to documentary, with some new footage of Hind's mother being interviewed, and some home video footage of Hind herself, playing on the beach. No other film this year will get more people talking, or more people crying.

★★★★★

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