Review: The Voice of Hind Rajab – The children speak

Directed by Kaouther Ben Hania
Starring Motaz Malhees, Amer Hlehel, Saja Kilani, Clara Khoury 

7.5/10

Such an intensely distressing true-life story that took place in the turmoil of Palestine in January 2024 is given the film treatment in a way that just increases its distress. The Voice of Hind Rajab documents the day at a Palestinian emergency aid service where they are on call with a six-year-old who is caught up in the Israeli military invasion. What makes this film all the more uncompromisingly upsetting is that the voice used in the film was not reperformed by an actress—it’s the real recorded voice of Hind Rajab herself.

At Red Crescent, an organisation dedicated to assisting the Gaza area with medical and evacuation support, Omar (Motaz Malhees) gets a call from Germany, a man who claims his family may be in trouble and needs to call their number. When Omar reaches the number, he gets the voice of Hind Rajab, a young girl who’s trapped in a car with too much gunfire outside to escape.

He gets his supervisor to determine that there is an ambulance just eight minutes away that can rescue them, but Mahdi (Amer Hlehel) refuses to send it till he gets the green light. Omar and his colleagues are frustrated with how long they end up taking, just to appease this bureaucratic rigmarole that he believes ought to be bypassed to save this child. But Mahdi claims he cannot have another ambulance driver killed because of a shortcut he was trying to make in processing these emergency vehicles.

These two clash as they try to work out the safest way to rescue this girl, but in the meantime, all they can do is try to keep her on the line and try to ascertain her situation, as well as keep her calm in her monstrously awful situation.

It appears as if the actors can’t help but give such a tremendously committed emotional performance, as they’re all likely genuinely affected by the material, that they’re no longer acting anymore. Kudos to all these actors, who have all very likely been permanently affected by acting in such a film.

As a commemoration, this film is an extraordinary document that succeeds in channelling an immense pain into something that feels important to communicate in cinema. But to still look at it as a narrative film, it can feel limited in that regard, too padded out at times and too reliant on its own repetitive pacing that can drag at times.

Given the nature of how The Voice of Hind Rajab was made, it sure has an urgency, but it’s also impossible to not be bummed out about it. Going beyond just a mere documentary account of this tragedy, or a straightforward narrative film either, this film in a way melds the two to convey this voice that cannot be unheard.

DAVID MORGAN-BROWN

The Voice of Hind Rajab plays at UWA’s Somerville Auditorium from Monday, February 16 to Wednesday, February 19, 2026. For more information and to buy tickets head to perthfestival.com.au