Hind to Hormuz
DYSTOPIAN fantasies are a time-honoured cinematic genre — and among comedies that deserve to be taken seriously, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove stands out at as a masterpiece that still resonates six decades later. It won no Oscars. One Battle After Another picked up six statuettes on Sunday.
A couple of months ago, encouraged by the critical approbation and the hype about an anti-fascist movie for fascist times, I gave it a try. And subsequently regretted the waste of time. Sure, its depictions of vast detention centres and a heavily militarised America find echoes in the current disorder. Overall, it’s a fairly incoherent shemozzle.
Any mention of vampires is a turn-off, so I haven’t watched Sinners. The only other Oscar nominee I can comment on is The Voice of Hind Rajab, which will haunt most viewers for the rest of their lives. Its harrowing theme should be known to everyone who has paid any attention to the genocide in Gaza, where the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF) has butchered more than 20,000 children in the past 26 months alone.
The details should be familiar: a five-year-old trapped two years ago in a car filled with murdered relatives, surrounded by Israeli tanks. An uncle, an aunt and four cousins. An older cousin lived long enough to contact the Palestinian Red Crescent. Shots rang out, and she too fell silent. When the Red Crescent rings back, Hind answers the phone. Asked whether her family members are sleeping, she says no, they are dead. Palestinian children learn the difference at a far too tender an age. As the hours slip by, Hind repeatedly asks to be rescued. The Red Crescent staff assure her that help is on the way. They try in vain to distract her. Hind is afraid of the encroaching dark, and wonders time and again: why can’t you come and get me? The actual audio of her desperate pleas is the centrepiece of the film. You can’t unhear it.
More bangs, and Hind too falls silent.
Initially, there was an ambulance just eight minutes away from Hind, but it couldn’t proceed without Israeli permission. The Red Crescent was obliged to go through the International Red Cross or the Palestinian health ministry, which in turn coordinated with the Israeli authorities. When the permission eventually comes, an ambulance inches its way towards the surviving victim. The distraught Red Crescent staff are monitoring its progress, hoping against hope. Loud bangs are heard. The ambulance is unresponsive. Did you hear shots ring out, the remote staff ask Hind. Yes, she says. More bangs, and the child too falls silent.
It took almost two weeks before Palestinian witnesses could survey the scene of the crime, with the mangled remains of the family car and the ambulance almost next to each other. The IDF wasn’t operating in that part of Gaza, Israel claimed. More than two years later, it also blatantly lies when confronted with the slaughter last week of four members of a family returning home in the West Bank from an Eid shopping trip. The IDF’s excuse is that the car was accelerating. Eyewitnesses confirm that it had stopped. Two of Ali and Waad Bani Odeh’s children were shot dead along with their parents. The two boys who survived were brutalised, but lived to tell the tale.
While Gaza languishes without hope and the death toll steadily rises in the West Bank’s ethnic cleansing, Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump have taken it upon themselves to bomb Iran into compliance. Iran has struck back, shattering whatever twisted model of a future Middle East that its adversaries might have envisaged. The region has irrevocably changed, but the shape of things to come remains shrouded in the fog of war.
There was more than a hint of panic in Trump’s pleas — combined with threats — for help to keep the Strait of Hormuz open for trade. There have been no volunteers, even among usually compliant European states. China has pointed out that the only way to guarantee freedom of navigation and steady the global economy is to halt the unwarranted war.
As Trump continues to prevaricate, demanding assistance over Hormuz and then, when it isn’t forthcoming, claiming it is surplus to requirements, one is reminded of Carl Sandburg’s epic poem The People, Yes from 90 years ago, in which a little girl — perhaps Hind’s age — witnesses her first military parade, and is told who soldiers are and what they do: “kill as many of the other side” as they can. She absorbs that information and declares, “I know something … Sometime they’ll give a war and nobody will come.” If we’re not already at that juncture, it can’t come too soon.
The Voice of Hind Rajab didn’t win an Oscar but received an unprecedented, tearful 23-minute standing ovation at last year’s Venice festival. Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther ben Hania deserves the applause, but the tale she tells calls for action.
Published in Dawn, March 18th, 2026