The Voice of Hind Rajab (2025)

Not rated, but this is one of those brutal movies that mixes real footage with fiction.  This is a movie that is meant to be as painful as possible because it is about the horrors of war.  While much of the movie is over the phone with a six-year-old, the descriptions of things happening are harrowing.  There is also some language when the characters aren't on the phone.  At one point, the movie shows real bodies of people who died in Gaza, but they are blurred out.  

DIRECTOR: Kaouther Ben Hania

Sometimes, I want to force people that I politically disagree with to watch a movie and have them continue spouting their ideology afterwards.  Now, I have to try for some degree of objectivity.  If someone asked me to sit down and watch that Angel Studios movie about child trafficking that we know is a false narrative, I would be skeptical too.  But The Voice of Hind Rajab is one of those movies that toes the line between "Based on a True Story" and a documentary.

The unique presentation of this film is explained in the actual movie itself.  For much of the movie, the actors on screen are performing the dialogue recorded from telephone conversations with six-year-old Hind Rajab.  The other side of the telephone is the actual recording of Hind Rajab.  Once in a while, when the film gets deep, sometimes we'll hear the voices of the Red Crescent phone operators and the actors only react to what they hear.  There is even one scene where we see video footage of the original operators as the actors pantomime the video, but out of focus.  It's incredilby powerful and this is one of those movies that is meant to make you question your own humanity.  

It feels like I'm completely brainwashed as I write this because of my outright and unabashed glowing tone approaching it.  The thing is, there are so many lines in this movie that reflect the frustrations that I've been having living through these last ten years of Empathy-Free America.  There's a line --straight up --that says something along the lines of "We've been showing them pictures of dead people on the sides of roads, killed in war, and no one lifted a finger.  We assume they are going to change their minds because they can hear the voice of a six-year-old?"  Yeah, that's how it feels, all the time.  There is no reason for me to think that anything in The Voice of Hind Rajab is fake.  I know that if I show this to someone on the Right, that's probably going to be the first thing that is said.  After all, I was dismissive about that Angel Studios thing.  Why wouldnt the same be true?  I'm trying to understand.  You have to see me trying to understand.  Still, I see a wide gulf between RIght Wing propaganda and people just trying to explain that war is hell and that they have documented Israel committing war crimes on audio.

In terms of movie-making, this is one of those movies that I oddly like.  I don't know why these kinds of movies hit hard when done right, but I really like a good "Bottle Episode" movie.  The two movies that I'm thinking about when I think of bottle episodes are Phone Booth and Buried (?).  The conceit of these movies always has to be simple.  In all of these stories, the phone is a quintessential element to story telling.  In Phone Booth, the guy can't hang up or he's going to be shot.  In Buried, the phone is dying and it is the only way that he can be found.  With a movie that has the title The Voice of..., you know that voice has to be throughout the film.  The fact that it is the real audio is what makes the movie.  Yes, the actors are acting. After all, to memorize their lines and their deliveries, they probably had to listen to those original recordings so many times that, at one point, they probably felt like it became noise.  And I do understand how acting works.  I know that the actors probably had to do those scenes over and over again.  Some of those performances were good. Some of them were probably lacking.  Still there seemed to be something more than simply acting out a hypothetical scene.  It makes the whole piece more than simply a gig.  There's something inherently altruistic about the whole production.  These people are keeping both the memory of a little girl alive and reminding people that a tragedy didn't have to happen.

Once again, I have to talk about the ending.  It's weird that I sometimes write remembering that real events colored everything that we saw on film.  Reality doesn't have to follow the rules of formula.   But I knew that this story couldn't have ended with a happy ending.  It's odd to have a room full of heroes and have to determine who the antagonist is.  There is almost a person v. nature element going on because the soldiers that are endangering Hind Rajab are never seen on screen.  They are nameless and faceless.  It's more like hating a concept, even though the soldiers are real people who commit real world atrocities.  From a narrative perpsective, that makes it real hard to identify someone who can never show up on screen.  Instead, I have to sympathize with the real life Mahdi, who may have the most thankless job in the world.

It's clear that Omar and Rana are the protagonists of the piece.  They are the ones sacrificing themselves for the good of a stranger that they haven't met.  But the bottle format means that everyone else, to greater or lesser degrees, are also sacrificing themselves.  Everyone there is on the same team.  Everyone there is trying to get Hind back home to her mother.  But Mahdi has the thankless job of playing things smart.  (Again, one of the big takeaways is that, even though everyone follows the book to the letter, despite constant attempts to sabotage those efforts, the Israeli government still kills everyone.)  But it has to be weird because Mahdi is a real world hero.  His face is in the movie. Not just the actor, but the real actor's face is in the movie.  And instead of this great glory that the guy probably deserves, he's kind of the antagonist of the piece.  If you knew Mahdi in real life --based exclusively on the events that the film portrays --yeah, he's a hero.  But it is really hard to like him in this movie because, from our protagonists' perspectives, he's the one who is slowing down the rescue of this poor little girl.  What he's really doing is trying to minimalize casualties and even that doesn't matter in the end.  (There's a line in the movie that Mahdi says along the lines of "If someone else dies under my watch, I can't do this anymore."  I wonder if he followed through on that, because that's a huge bummer in a movie that's already a huge bummer.)

I get real sad, guys.  I have slipped this in other blogs.  I pepper my blogs full of therapy stuff.  It's a blog that few people read, so I can use it for journaling as well.  I am so glad that this movie exists, but I also know that few people that I need to watch this movie will watch this movie.  I had a debate with Henson the other day asking whether or not art moves the political spectrum in any meaningful way.  I argued wholeheartedly that it did.  But I also saw Henson's perspective that often that change is slow.  The Voice of Hind Rajab is such a painful film and it is so important, I'm sad that people won't watch it because they don't want to potentially change their thoughts on what they have "sunk [so much] cost" into.  This movie was incredible.