Review: THE VOICE OF HIND RAJAB

An emergency worker in a call centre gets a call from a girl trapped in a car. Before he can establish the facts there is a burst of machine gun fire and the call goes dead. Oh, it's January of last year and they're in Gaza. Omar, who took the call, has to wander around numb for a few breaths before the girl calls back. She's only eight minutes away, assuming clear streets.

But that doesn't mean they can race out and scoop her up. The IDF are destroying their way from the area and no one can make such assumptions. Besides, there's protocol. The co-ordinator is scrambling around the various points of contact, from the Red Cross to local hospitals still standing and anyone else he can talk to to get the green light for the ambulance to get to the girl unimpeded. Meanwhile, Omar and anyone else at the Red Crescent response center gather around the thread of six year old Hind's voice as she pleads for them to save her. 

Everyone's frustrated. Everyone's angry. They'd run the few blocks if they could  but they wouldn't make it past one or two. They pray with Hind on the line, read her passages from the Koran, attempt to distract her by talking about her life and favourite things. Night is coming on and she is afraid of the dark. The tank that shot up the car and killed the family members around her is coming back.

The audio of Hind's  voice is the original recording. Actors play the parts of the Red Crescent staff. This is mixed with their real life counterparts here and there. The screen is frequently filled with an audio pulse as the sound is recorded, dots that expand and  contract with the sound of the voices. There is not a moment of the running time that allows us to lessen the tension of this situation but writer director Kaouther Ben Hania  provides deftly managed peaks and troughs of action and relief, however slight. We are not given the shock tactic of graphic footage from the scene, staged or authentic because Ben Hania trusts us to be with her film. The cast is unfaltering and we are beside them.

There's little more to say beyond, "go and see this" besides how it will acquaint you further with the frustration, the anger, the futility, the horror, the compassion, the gulf between the lightless ill of military licence, the anguish, the stress, and the clear suggestion that the architects of this destruction felt no guilt.

There is an office window on which the co-ordinator sketches, while on the phone, the various points of contact to negotiate a green light for the rescue. It ends up looking like a loop with a twist in the middle, but it's not smoothly drawn: he's distracted and leaves it looking swollen and misshapen, like a wounded symbol of infinity.