The Sotto Voce Plea That Will Haunt the World Forever: the Voice of Hind Rajab
Photograph Source: Lua Eva Blue – CC BY 4.0
The 2025 cinematic experience was a long and virtually forgettable season. The kind of year that makes cinephiles like me slip into an artistic malaise when contemplating the future of motion pictures. But no matter how disillusioned or inspired I feel, it is always difficult for me to recount the first film I saw, at the start of a calendar year, by the time December and the arctic wind blow into New York’s independent theatres. An ongoing lapse in cognitive function that will not occur at the end of 2026.
Last night (or the evening of January 9), I experienced what I’m sure will be one of the most poignantly brilliant films of my lifetime and in the history of cinema: The Voice of Hind Rajab. Like many people, I had heard about the 23-minute standing ovation out in Venice. I knew how Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuaron, Jonathan Glazer, and many others offered director Kaouther Ben Hania their support for the film. And I read, sparingly, about the devastating tragedy that struck the Rajab family on January 29, 2024. But nothing can prepare the heart for the painful in-depth look at what unfolded that horrible day, or the cinematic devices Miss Hania uses to convey the gruesome tale.
The film is a docudrama sprinkled with a cast of utterly convincing actors, all of whom hail from Palestine, and their conviction and solidarity bleeds from their performances—a portrayal that replicates the struggles of the Palestine Red Crescent Society dispatchers and paramedics, who desperately tried to rescue young Hind Rajab.
But the centerpiece surrounded by all those glinting elements is the ingredient that gives the film its preternatural aesthetic, and the gripping, real-time pathos that drags the audience into the crux of the distressing ordeal: all the dialogue in the film contributed by Hind Rajab are sound bites that were recorded the day she was murdered.
For a large portion of the film, Hind’s voice is the only presence exerted by the protagonist that Hania allows the audience to connect to—and what a chilling, ethereal connection it is. Perhaps knowing the macabre fate of the victim lends to the eerie ambience exuding from the film’s audio, but hers is a voice that haunts every scene which she is staged in, contorting the verisimilitude in the film’s dialogue into an uncanny reenactment that echoes the meek tone, soul and overwhelming tension of the actual occurrence.
Out of fear of divulging spoilers, I will refrain from unpacking the film piecemeal and explore its courageous key figure—a darling five-year-old with an unforgettable face—one that brings to my imagination the youthful appearance of da Vinci’s most renowned 16th century sitter. As I mentioned, the director only utilizes Hind’s voice to establish her presence in the first half of the film, so when the camera finally zooms in on her adorable, cherubic image, the story’s emotional stake instantly foreshadows all the harsher pangs to come.
It is fascinating to muse on why people arrive at specific times for specific reasons. With the current world population exceeding 8.2 billion people, it is easy to conclude why most of those reasons affect things in microcosmic proportions, and why some are never realized or revealed at all.
There are lives, however, that arrive for more substantial concerns, no matter how brief or protracted their allotted time may be. And it is obvious to me that, like the beloved 20th century martyr, Anne Frank, young Miss Rajab came here to hold us all accountable, to deny anyone the opportunity to shape a deluded, self-serving narrative that could justify the revolting, damnable agency that is genocide. And in the back seat of a hatchback that was being riddled with over three hundred machine gun rounds, this tiny orchard, still demarcated in the nurturing sepals of middle childhood, achieved her designated objective and withstood, for a brief yet significant time, an insatiable evil. And now, because of her, deflection is a useless, impotent contrivance, and it is more problematic to disregard the horror taking place in Israel and what remains of sovereign Palestine.
It is also intriguing to think about why there is something undeniably permanent about a voice that rises above the all-consuming mayhem surrounding genocide. For example, I am always compelled to pause for a few seconds whenever I run into an article or photo of Anne Frank on the web. I’ll admit, I am a de facto historian, but I believe I do this because somewhere beneath the inconsequential feeling of nostalgia, I know I’m looking at one of the most integral arbitrators of the 20th century. A monumental figure in culture and society that will forever offer a particular frame of reference for a critical place in time. Mysterious is the befitting adjective.
Most martyrs, I think, have this effect on society. It’s what places them a tier above everyone else. And now, like so many before her, whose lives were squandered in the dire trenches of troubles past, little Hind Rajab will be perched on a figurative caryatid column of her own.
As her voice resonates in theatres, homes, and subconscious minds in perpetuity, I pray she has found the peace she sought in her gallant, final hour.
The post The Sotto Voce Plea That Will Haunt the World Forever: the Voice of Hind Rajab appeared first on CounterPunch.org.