The Voice of Hind Rajab
First screened and reviewed in October 2025
Director: Kaouther Ben Hania. Cast: Motaz Malhees, Saja Kilani, Amer Hlehel, Clara Khoury. Screenplay: Kaouther Ben Hania. In Brief:
Emotionally powerful, in more ways than I'd guessed. Tactics work unevenly, but "perfect" wasn't important.
VOR:⑤
If it only amplified Hind's story, in itself and as a metonym for so many others, that's valuable. The structural bind of impededed care also matters.
I guess I feel like there are cases where a piece of art is so committed and so potentially successful at compelling moral and political attention where it rightly, urgently belongs that it's not hugely important if the work is "great." And in truth, I don't think The Voice of Hind Rajab holds up consistently as a film. I can gladly praise the way it escalates tension while also dissipating and frustrating it, given the unenviable position of emergency responders who also have to be multifactor logisticians, protecting people on all sides of a horrendous situation. That said, the movie has a murky POV on the obligations of the rescue coordinator, which are sometimes presented as maddening necessity and other times framed as pure and gratuitous dereliction of duty. The acting and lensing are rarely better than basic. The strong emphasis on elapsed time within the narrative sits at odds with the movie's slippery way of staging a 3-hour ordeal in 89 minutes as if it's a real-time depiction, when the material might be asking to be either longer or shorter. Repetiton and protraction are part of the point but occasionally feel miscalculated. Ben Hania, whose hall-of-mirrors approach to fact/fiction hybrids worked nervy wonders in her Oscar-nominated Four Daughters, sometimes draws attention to her own meta-level construction of Hind Rajab just when the titular voice ought to be our concerted point of focus.
Still, on top of the movie's manifest virtues (and I feel mixed about foregrounding caveats), if people have been struggling to process the tens of thousands of lives lost in Gaza and either want or need a single, extended, child-centered, nearly-avoided tragedy to rouse their feelings or their impulse toward action, Hind Rajab may fill exactly that need. And it's interesting to see a portrait of the Palestinian Red Crescent that exposes built-in paradoxes and agonizing tradeoffs, when it's easy to imagine a more purely sanctifying depiction. Grade:B
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment.)
