The Voice of Hind Rajab

Widescreen

Ṣawt Hind Rajab | صوت هند رجب

Premiering at Sundance earlier this year, Paloma Schneideman’s coming-of-age debut launches our festival with a tender portrait of 14-year-old Sid, as she tentatively traverses insecurity, identity and desire during the summer of 2006.

With the last words of a five-year-old girl, Kaouther Ben Hania's devastating documentary puts a single, unbearable human story at the heart of an ongoing catastrophe.

Drawing widespread critical praise following its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival, plus a Best International Feature nomination at this year’s Oscars, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s searing docudrama The Voice of Hind Rajab explores the frantic real-life mission by Palestinian Red Crescent volunteers to save a five-year-old Palestinian girl, Hind Rajab, trapped in a car under heavy gunfire in Gaza.

Utilising the actual audio of emergency phone calls made by Hind Rajab alongside dramatised recreations of the call-centre volunteers tasked with coordinating her rescue, a maddening picture emerges of the tangled web of military and governmental bureaucracy blocking rescue units as a young girl’s pleas for help intensify. The result is both a gripping race-against-the-clock thriller and a devastating reality-check on the ghastly human toll the Gaza War has inflicted on innocent families.

Destined to spark sobering and complex discussions about the conduct of Israeli military forces against the Palestinian civilian population, Hind Rajab demands our full attention to emotionally connect with the sense of helplessness, nightmarish horror and blistering anger experienced by those trapped in the heart of the conflict. – Ben Cho