The little girl is going to die. There is no suspense. One of the advantages of the immense response that the film aroused during its appearance in countless festivals where it was applauded and rewarded everywhere was that it made public the outcome of the tragedy that it recreates.
“Tragedy”, indeed in the sense that an atrocious event becomes a manifestation of an infinitely larger horror. And even tragedy in the sense of the rigor of the construction, of the organization of time and space, of the implacable nature of the sequence of events.
But not tragedy in the sense that the fatal outcome would be the work of destiny. No abstract or superhuman entity here, but very real assassins: the Israeli army, engaged in a genocidal war that is still ongoing.
The tension and the relentless
On January 29, 2024, the Palestinian Red Crescent, in the West Bank, received a phone call from a 6-year-old girl. She is in a car in which all the other occupants died after being machine-gunned by an IDF tank.
Terrified, surrounded by the corpses of her family, she called for help for several hours, speaking with four volunteers who tried to reassure her while trying to obtain permission for an ambulance to come and pick her up. When this authorization is finally obtained, they follow the progress of the vehicle on their screens, located by GPS.
Until, just before the rescuers arrived, the Israelis killed the little girl and the two ambulance rescuers, Yusuf Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun.
Of this sequence of events, we hear the real trace: the recording of the voice of this child who was called Hind Rajab Hamada, a recording archived by the Red Crescent. We see the reconstruction of this sequence of events, by actors, who replay what Hind’s interlocutors said and did.
It is not despite, but with the absence of suspense that Kaouther Ben Hania’s film is an important film. This is due to the extreme tension between the dramatic violence of what it makes visible and the knowledge of the implacable nature of what is happening – what has happened for more than two years to tens of thousands of men, women and children, and which continues at this moment despite the ceasefire.
This violent tension concerns the monstrosities committed in Gaza by the Israelis, but also, but above all, the blindness and helplessness, here and now. They accuse the leaders of the rest of the world of active complicity with Zionist criminals. They underline the mixture of paralysis, indifference and fatalism of the majority of citizens almost everywhere, particularly in France.
The importance of duration and form
Mobilizing together the resources of documentary (the recorded voice) and fiction (the scenes replayed by actors), the Tunisian filmmaker constructs a proposal whose power is also due to the duration of the film.
In ten minutes, the story of Hind and those who try to save her would be an emotional blow, staggering in its violence.
In an hour and a half, it is, based on intense emotions which are in no way diminished by the absence of suspense, but on the contrary addressed to the real issues, an invitation to question a vast set of behaviors, which does not only concern this intersection at the corner of two streets reduced to ashes in Gaza, where a child is suffocating from terror surrounded by the corpses of her family.
With this film, Kaouther Ben Hania continues a singular research work with the means of cinema, work which develops the propositions of two of his previous films, The Challat of Tunis And Olfa’s Daughters. A work of the senses and thought, of belief and reason, where the problematized use of the contributions of fiction and documentary explores new avenues, opening up other modes of understanding.
It may seem inappropriate, even indecent, to focus on cinematographic processes in view of the horror that the film tells, the horror of the event itself and that of the context of mass crimes in which it takes place.
But faced with the tetany that the accumulation of atrocities always ends up causing, a phenomenon that we know only too well and that the media repeat ad nauseam, it is on the contrary possible, and desirable, that formal research maintains the singularity of views, of our views, the singularity of sensibilities. This was, seventy years ago, the great lesson of Night and Fog by Alain Resnais, who was criticized for his formalism. It is still valid today.
From a raw fact, of which there is a burning testimony, the Tunisian filmmaker constructs a set of choices, much less simple than it seems, as to what is said and kept quiet, shown and left off-camera. She chooses framing and durations, her actors and actresses embody in a concerted manner what those they interpret have said and done.
None of this will revive Hind. None of this will stop the ongoing genocide. But it works, in the only places where a film can do so, by setting spectators in motion internally, at least those open enough to have gone to see it, or convinced of the legitimate condemnation of Israel’s crimes pronounced by the highest authorities of international justice. Because there remains a lot to perceive and question, even when you are already a potential spectator of such a film.
This sets things in motion, intellectually and emotionally, including to (question) the means mobilized by the filmmaker. In what The Voice of Hind Rajab is not only a moving film, but a necessary film.
