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The devastating last words of a five-year-old girl - and a film that refuses to let the world look away.
In The Voice of Hind Rajab, the voice in question is a small one, belonging to a young girl alone and in unconscionable peril, high and breathless with fear and confusion. But it cuts through Kaouther Ben Hania’s film with piercing clarity, largely because, in contrast to a surrounding chorus of frantic adult voices, it isn’t performed. Rather, it’s a real-life recording of the last words ever spoken by Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian child killed on Jan. 29, 2024, after her family’s car was shelled by Israeli forces during their invasion of the Gaza Strip. In her final hours, the girl repeatedly phoned call-center volunteers at the Palestine Red Crescent Society, pleading for a rescue vehicle that never made it to her.
Making that horrifying 70-minute audio file the heart and spine of her film, Ben Hania baldly confronts her audience with the real-time fate of one of more than 18,000 children killed so far in an ongoing genocide.
If The Voice of Hind Rajab opens one hitherto blinkered eye, or ear, to the atrocities in Gaza, it will have done its job. - Guy Lodge, Variety
“Fierce, urgent and heart-shattering… With startling audacity, director Ben Hania has used the real audio recording of Rajab’s heart-wrenching voice…The result was greeted with a 23-minute standing ovation at Venice. Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian”
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