Monthly Archives: January 2026

  • The Voice of Hind Rajab

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Ṣawt Hind Rajab

    Kaouther Ben Hania  (2025)

    ‘January 29, 2024.  Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call.  A 6-year old girl is trapped in a car under fire in Gaza, pleading for rescue.  While trying to keep her on the line, they do everything they can to get an ambulance to her.  Her name was Hind Rajab.’

    That was the ‘official synopsis’ (Deadline.com) for Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab ahead of its world premiere at last September’s Venice Film Festival (where the film won the Grand Jury Prize).  Not quite two years since the events in question, there have already been three screen accounts of what happened.  A Dutch film, Close Your Eyes Hind, was the first to appear, in June 2025.  A few weeks after Venice, Hind Under Siege, from Jordan, was screened at the Gaza International Festival for Women’s Cinema.  Both those films were shorts and dramatised events, their casts including a child playing Hind Rajab.  Kaouther Ben Hania’s version is the first feature-length treatment (89 minutes) and formally more complicated.  This is a ‘docudrama’, and Ben Hania’s choice of title is important.  Hind Rajab doesn’t appear on screen, other than in a few pieces of family video and photographs, but the narrative includes the real audio recording of her calls for help.

    Jafar Panahi’s personal circumstances and It Was Just an Accident’s political context are always in a viewer’s mind during that film.  Kaouther Ben Hania, by putting together dramatic reconstruction and distressing actuality, and telling the story in something close to real time, confronts the audience more starkly.  She sets things up to suggest a standard dramatisation, introducing four workers in the Red Crescent offices in Ramallah, the administrative capital of Palestine in the central West Bank.  She sketches in a very few character details for each one of these two men and two women, and their tough, grim work.  Then one of them answers a phone call from a terrified girl.  This initial contact is made not by Hind but by her fifteen-year-old cousin, Layan Hamadeh.  She, Hind and other family members were fleeing Gaza City when an Israeli army tank opened fire on their car, killing five of the seven people in it.  Layan Hamadeh’s call ends with the sound of machine-gun fire and her screams.  When the Red Crescent workers phone back, Hind answers, now the only person in the car alive.  In the Ramallah offices, the four workers start their urgent but, it transpires, tortuous attempts to negotiate with the Gaza Health Ministry and the Israeli military to guarantee safe passage for an ambulance crew to get to the car and rescue the little girl.

    Some reviews of The Voice of Hind Rajab refer to ‘integration’ of the reconstruction of Red Crescent efforts and the voice of the terrified child (who was five, not six, pace the ‘official synopsis’).  This is integration in name only.  The recordings – their authenticity stressed by Ben Hania’s showing on screen the audio waveform of Hind’s voice and the recording’s digital file name – overpowers the reconstruction.  To say it’s uncomfortable to hear the recordings would be a serious understatement, yet the film does provoke discomfort – with Ben Hania’s approach.  The four Red Crescent staff, whose real names are used, are Omar A Alqam (Motaz Malhees), Mahdi M Aljamal (Amar Hlehel), Rana Hassan Faqih (Saja Kilani) and Nisreen Jeries Qawas (Clara Khoury).  Ben Hania dramatises tensions and disagreement among them, and particularly between the two men, as to how to proceed.  The arguments between impassioned, volatile Omar and Mahdi, his more cautious and conciliatory supervisor, are presumably accurate.  Even so, conflicts of this kind are what a viewer expects from screen stories, fact-based or otherwise, about a team of people struggling to deal with an emergency.

    The use of Hind Rajab’s own voice isn’t what you expect, and the fact that many in the film’s audience have heard it before – Hind’s calls went viral in the days after 29 January – makes little difference.  All four main actors are admirable but knowing they are actors almost lets us off the hook, for as long, that is, as the foursome are interacting with each other.  When they interact with the child’s voice, it’s certainly disturbing but that feeling comes from not only hearing the voice but also witnessing acted interaction with it.  Omar, Mahdi, Rana and Nisreen celebrate prematurely as the ambulance approaches its destination, before phone contact with the paramedics suddenly stops with the sound of an explosion.  The rescue vehicle itself was attacked by Israeli militia and the two paramedics, Yusuf al-Zeino and Ahmed al-Madhoun, died – but that’s not the only reason why this is another part of the narrative that’s hard to stomach.  It’s virtually impossible not to stage it as a so-near-and-yet-so-far moment, familiar in suspense drama and thereby incongruent with Ben Hania’s extraordinary use of actual audio recordings.

    Near the end of The Voice of Hind Rajab, the actors and their setting disappear.  They’re replaced by an excerpt from a news interview with Hind Rajab’s mother, at some point between 29 January and 10 February 2024, when the child’s family, after the withdrawal of Israeli military from the area, discovered the car containing their dead relatives, including Hind.  There are TV news shots of the wreckage and of bodies being recovered.  The mother’s voice finally describes her daughter’s love of the sea, over video images of Hind playing on a beach.  Ben Hania’s two films before this one were a drama, The Man Who Sold His Skin (2020), and a documentary, Four Daughters (2023).  She might seem particularly qualified to direct docudrama, and The Voice of Hind Rajab, like its two predecessors, has been well received internationally.  There’s no denying it’s powerful cinema and I don’t doubt Kaouther Ben Hania’s humanitarian reasons for making the film.  I do question how she chose to make it.

    16 January 2026

  • Le corbeau

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Henri-Georges Clouzot (1943)

    Le corbeau was first released in France during the German Occupation, in late 1943, but public screenings were soon banned by the collaborationist Vichy government.  Who is sending increasingly nasty and accusatory poison-pen letters, signed ‘the Raven’, in the small rural town of Saint-Robin?   En route to answering that question, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s mystery drama presents a cast of dislikeable, often immoral, characters, and disparages the practice of informing on neighbours:  both elements were bound to incur the Vichy regime’s disapproval.  To make matters worse, and although Saint-Robin is a fictional place, Clouzot and Louis Chavance, who wrote Le corbeau with him, make clear in an opening legend that their story could be happening ‘ici ou ailleurs‘ – ‘here or elsewhere’.  The Resistance press, for different reasons, objected to the film’s negative portrait of supposedly typical French citizens:  besides, Le corbeau was produced through Continental Films, German-controlled and the only legally authorised film production company in operation in Nazi-occupied France.  When World War II ended, Clouzot was one of several French directors tried in court for collaborating with the Germans and banned from making films in future.  That ban was lifted as early as 1947 but Le corbeau would remain out of circulation for much longer.  It continued to be shown within private film clubs but not publicly again in France until 1969.

    The extraordinary notoriety surrounding Le corbeau runs the risk of obscuring the film itself, but it’s eminently worth seeing (in my case, worth seeing a second time).  Clouzot’s brisk, icy storytelling is compelling, despite the largely unappealing human beings on the screen.  The central character is Rémy Germain (Pierre Fresnay), a medical doctor, a recent newcomer to Saint-Robin and the most frequent target of the poison pen.  The letter-writer accuses Germain of carrying out illegal abortions, branding him ‘the angel-maker’, and of an adulterous affair with a married woman, Laura Vorzet (Micheline Francey) – beautiful and much younger than her psychiatrist husband Michel (Pierre Larquey).  There is a mutual attraction between Laura and Germain, but his actual (ex-) lover is Denise Saillens (Ginette Leclerc), married to the principal of the local school (Noël Roquevert), who is also Germain’s landlord.  Denise is sultry, sullen and walks with a limp that signals her moral shortcomings.  According to the Raven, her little sister Rolande (Liliane Maigné), a young teenager, is another of Germain’s inamoratas; more evidently, Rolande is an occasional thief and persistent nosey parker.  Laura’s sister is the embittered and censorious Marie Corbin (Héléna Manson), a nurse at the hospital in Saint-Robin.  A patient there, François (Roger Blin), receives an anonymous letter informing him that his cancer is terminal.  To the deep distress of his loving mother (Sylvie), François commits suicide.  Marie thereby becomes Raven suspect number one and is sent to prison.

    In what follows, and in turn, almost every one of the above-mentioned characters will appear to be the culprit.  A pivotal moment arrives in church – churchgoing for most locals, unbeliever Germain a notable exception, continues, despite Saint-Robin’s epidemic of vicious paranoia.  A letter from the Raven falls into the church nave from the gallery above.  It’s clear that Marie has been wrongly accused, since she’s behind bars.  Those standing in the gallery when the letter dropped are all subjected to an extensive handwriting test.   From this point, the finger of suspicion accelerates in moving from one person to the next.  These quickfire changes nearly make the final choice of Raven look arbitrary:  the narrative turns into a variation on pass-the-parcel – it just depends on who’s holding the poison pen when the music stops.  Is the subtext to the film’s opening warning, that the story might happen anywhere, that the guilty party might be anyone?  Perhaps, but Clouzot seems to put paid to these thoughts with the final unmasking which, unlike the earlier ones, sees a kind of retributive justice being done.

    Smiling faces in Le corbeau are a rarity.  The few in evidence tend to be expressions of derision or dissimulation so it seems apt, too, that the last Raven is the film’s most consistently genial presence.  There are times when the dramatis personae are collectively so loathsome that you almost want to laugh, but this isn’t a black comedy.  It is, though, decidedly a film noir – never mind that the term wasn’t yet in use in 1943 (though it’s often applied retrospectively to Hollywood movies of the early 1940s).  The combination of Clouzot’s unblinking misanthropy and Nicolas Hayer’s cinematography is a grim yet bracing reminder of black-and-white cinema’s special facility for imparting moral starkness and urgency to a story.

    In his late-life diaries My Name Escapes Me (1997), Alec Guinness named Pierre Fresnay his favourite actor.  Over the course of Le corbeau, you certainly come to appreciate Fresnay’s excellence.  Without warming to his character, you’re fascinated by his hints throughout that there’s more to Rémy Germain than you’re being told.  The eventual revelation of the doctor’s personal history, before he came to Saint-Robin, slightly humanises the story and makes complete sense of Fresnay’s expert playing.  He worked more than once with Continental Films during the Occupation; once the War ended, Fresnay too was publicly vilified (and briefly imprisoned).  He would soon go on to make Monsieur Vincent (1947), which Guinness singled out as his finest work, but Le corbeau was the last of several films that Fresnay made with Clouzot.   That’s a pity:  you wonder how much more substantial a film Les diaboliques (1955) might have been with Pierre Fresnay as its leading man.

    15 January 2026

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