The atmosphere exiting the debut press screening of “The Voice of Hind Rajab” early Wednesday morning at the Venice Film Festival was like nothing this longtime festivalgoer has ever seen. A sea of red eyes. Copious tissues. Utter silence as friends and colleagues stumbled into the sunlight, and into each other’s arms, weeping inconsolably. What was there to say when faced with the most devastating film of the festival and perhaps the year, depicting the present horror in Gaza that includes the killing of Palestinian children and humanitarian workers at the hands of Israeli forces?
The heartbreaking spine of the film is made of real voice recordings from Jan. 29, 2024, between a 6-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, and workers in the Palestinian Red Crescent emergency call center in Ramallah, desperately trying to save her after Israeli soldiers opened fire on her family car at a gas station, leaving her trapped inside with the corpses of her aunt, her uncle and four cousins. She asks repeatedly for the adults in the call center to come get her, tells them that she is afraid of the dark, not knowing that the delays are because the call center coordinator (played by Amer Hlehel) has a poster in his office with photos of the 18 “humanitarian worker martyrs” he’s already lost and has no assurances that the ambulance won’t get attacked.
It would be the final phone call of her life, which sparked investigations from The Washington Post and other newspapers, as well as a global outcry. The film asks: How could Israel have granted Palestinian paramedics safe passage to rescue her and then just killed them all? (The Israel Defense Forces told Reuters this week that the incident was still under review and declined to comment further.)
There is no blood, no visual depictions of violence in the film, told entirely from the perspective of the call center workers, who make a perfect conduit for horrified viewers who feel ineffectual and useless, and have no idea how they can help.
The audience, heaving with tears in the press screening, rose, applauding, even though no one who made the film was in the theater. When the cast and Ben Hania came to the press room for that afternoon’s news conference, they got another extended standing ovation. At the gala public premiere a few hours later, the standing ovation went on for more than 20 minutes. Actor Motaz Malhees, who plays distraught call center worker Omar, clutched a large photo of Hind, as audience members raised a Palestinian flag and several kaffiyeh in the air, peppering their applause with chants of “Free, free Palestine!”
“On behalf of all of us actors, and in the name of the entire team, we ask, ‘Isn’t it enough?’ Enough of the mass killing, the starvation, the dehumanization, the destruction, the ongoing occupation,” said Saja Kilani, who portrays a call station supervisor who’s trying to keep Hind calm, reading aloud a statement from the cast and crew at the news conference. “Hind’s story is about a child crying out, ‘Save me.’ And the real question is, how have we let a child beg for life?”
Brad Pitt and his Plan B partners, along with Alfonso Cuarón, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara and “The Zone of Interest” director Jonathan Glazer, have all signed onto the film as executive producers. “I think the fact that all those names joined the movie means something, and I think that things should change,” Ben Hania said.
washingtonpost.com