Even though Palestine’s independent Red Crescent ambulance service has an active path to making a humanitarian impact on Gaza as it’s bombarded by Israel, The Voice of Hind Rajab shows its powerlessness in a way that’s relatable to all of us, as we watch, helpless, far away on our screens. Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania expands her work with dramatic reenactments that she showcased in Four Daughters [+leggi anche:
recensione
trailer
intervista: Kaouther Ben Hania
scheda film], fearlessly melding the actual recording of six-year-old girl Hind Rajab calling into the Red Crescent with a high-octane dramatisation by professional actors, who play the emergency workers doing their utmost to rescue her. In keeping with the mass public solidarity towards Palestine at this year’s Venice Film Festival, its competition premiere last night was greeted with a record 23-minute standing ovation.

The death of Rajab, after being trapped in a wrecked car underneath her already-perished family members, was of course an incident that drew immense empathy in the early months of Israel’s genocide (a classification that has finally reached a broader international consensus), which still rages on almost two years after the 7 October attacks. The recovered 70-minute audio file of her call – with its .wav audio filename shown in a caption above a waveform as it is played – is the foundation for Ben Hania’s concise yet heart-rending film, interacting with the scripted scenes fluidly, but in a way that nervily makes us question its being deployed. This is a time and subject matter where we might overlook the demands for subtlety in drama, but Ben Hania’s direct appeal to the audience’s emotions is more manipulative than other filmmakers approaching this subject might be comfortable with.

Whilst the real-life details are obviously horrifying, and the audio and photographic reportage of the aftermath rightly accrued great virality and exposure on social media, Ben Hania’s further coup is making us understand the procedural order of events. She creates suspense, even though we’re aware of the tragic real outcome, with the emotionally short-fused Omar (Motaz Malhees) picking up first the call of Rajab’s sister, then the younger girl herself. The main obstacle to a simple ambulance search-and-rescue operation is, of course, northern Gaza’s continual state as a combat zone, with authorisation for this independent organisation (indeed operating independently to the territory’s political infrastructure) subject to numerous bureaucratic approvals, and the main supervisor, Mahdi (Amer Hlehel), forced to make calls himself on which Gazans to potentially sacrifice, with their own fleet of ambulances depleting by the day.

Uncomfortable as it is to make cinematic comparisons, The Voice of Hind Rajab is in the vein of recent compressed accounts of rescues and heroic bravery from emergency services, although it obviously goes further by allowing in an actual record of the event (and occasional cutaways to the real people whom the actors are playing), giving a further connection to “reality”, and awkwardly rendering the acting and screenwriting broader and more melodramatic. But returning to the apt sense of distance and technological mediation that the film creates, it also emphasises that this is an unprecedented catastrophe and act of collective punishment from Israel, where, let alone Hamas, every Gazan is apparently targeted, and civil protections by intermediaries like the Red Crescent, not to mention journalists and recognised diplomatic organisations, count for nothing.

The Voice of Hind Rajab is a production by Tunisia and France, staged by Mime Films and Tanit Films. Its international sales are overseen by The Party Film Sales.