Review: 'The Voice of Hind Rajab' blends drama and documentary to tell a harrowing tale of trauma and compassion in the Gaza war

The trauma of war, as experienced by those on the ground and the people trying to help them, is depicted in emotionally stark terms in “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” one of the most immediate and necessary dramas about the war in Gaza to arrive in theaters.

Writer-director Kaouther Ben Hania doesn’t set her movie in Gaza, but in a call center in Ramallah, on the West Bank, miles away from the shooting and bloodshed. The center is operated by Red Crescent, the Muslim world’s version of the Red Cross, and operated by experts who field calls from Palestinians in Israeli-controlled territory. 

When the call comes from Gaza, the operators will find out where the injured person is, then give that information to a coordinator – here, a man named Mahdi (American Hlehel) — who will then call his counterpart with the Red Cross, to start a daisy chain of calls to get the Israeli army to allow a path for an ambulance to travel. 

On this day, Omar (Motaz Malhees) takes a call from a Palestinian living in Germany, who says his sister in Gaza is in trouble. Omar gets the sister’s number, and learns she’s in a car with members of her extended family, pinned down by soldiers and a nearby tank. Then Omar hears gunfire.

I should let you know right here about the choice Ben Hania makes with the calls we hear in this movie: They’re all real audio from Red Crescent’s call center.

After he hears the gunfire on the line, the line cuts out and Omar tries the number again. This time, a child answers. Her name, we’re told, is Hind Rajab, She’s 6 years old and she’s terrified, and Omar and another operator, Rana (Saja Kilani), soon learn why: Hind is surrounded by the corpses of her aunt, uncle and four cousins. 

For Omar and Rana, it’s now a race against time, as they implore Mahdi to work the phones harder to find one of the last ambulance crews in northern Gaza — and then to call in every favor to get the “green light” for a route to get an ambulance to Hind’s location. Meanwhile, the center’s therapist, Nisreen (Clara Khoury), splits her time between helping talk to Hind and keeping Omar, Rana and Mahdi from destroying themselves from the stress of the situation.

Yes, that voice is the real Hind Rajab, whose plight became international news when Red Crescent posted some of the moments re-enacted here on social media. At the time, that decision was made to perhaps coerce the Israeli military to call a temporary truce, so the ambulance could get through to the girl. Since then — and after the aftermath of this one day in Gaza was revealed — Hind Rajab became a symbol for the young victims of this war, killed and injured and orphaned only because they grew up in the wrong place.

Ben Hania stages the film like a claustrophobic thriller, similar in tone and scope to another great recent movie, director Tim Fehlbaum’s “September 5.” This movie, like that one, consolidates all the action in one office, reliant on technology but also paralyzed by it, too far away to be anything other than a reassuring voice on the other end of the phone.

The quartet of actors are superb in reenacting the actions and emotions of the real-life Red Crescent team. Particularly good is Kilani as Rana, the one who was almost out the door when the call came in and pours her heart into trying to reassure a scared little girl.

Ben Hania employs a few maneuvers that blurs the line between re-enactment and documentary, such as a harrowing passage where someone holds up a cellphone to get video of the team, and for a moment we see actors on one screen and the real Red Crescent workers on the phone’s s screen. That scene, and others where the operators’ real voices briefly substitute for the actors’, don’t take the viewer out of the drama but plunge us deeper into it.

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‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’

★★★★

Opens Friday, January 16, at the Broadway Centre Cinemas (Salt Lake City). Not rated, but probably PG-13 for depictions of war and trauma, and for language. Running time: 89 minutes; in Arabic with subtitles.