A six-year-old Palestinian girl's emergency call becomes the sole focus of an unadorned cinematic piece that refuses reconstruction or visualization. The recording of Hind Rajab pleading, "I'm scared, come and get me," is played in full and given space to register as evidence, grief, and human testimony. The film uses minimalist audiovisual framing — sound waves and a file label — to preserve the call's integrity and to convey horror without spectacle. The presentation treats the voice with respect, foregrounds ongoing escalation of violence, and renders the experience as an elegy for a child whose fate feels tragically inevitable.
During my journalism MA, when I decided, "No, thank you, news journalism isn't for me," and "Yes please to the softer world of film journalism," I did not imagine that film reviewing would ever entail passing artistic judgement on documentary evidence of war crimes. Nor that I would be doing so in a global climate in which the war criminals in question, far from being held to account, are continuing on in the same vein.
The story of 6-year-old Hind Rajab made headlines in January 2024 after the Palestine Red Crescent released audio of her distressed emergency call, made from a service station in Tel al-Hawa in southern Gaza. Even establishment news channels, generally averse to displaying the humanity of individual Palestinians, could not resist this cri de coeur of an innocent in peril. Her sweet, trembling voice, saying, "I'm scared, come and get me," traveled around the world.
For her latest film, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania has sourced the entire call and treated it with respect, horror, and grief, affording it space to play out in in full without attempts to visualize, animate, or reconstruct what is happening on the ground for Hind. Instead, whenever we hear Hind's voice, sound waves fill the screen and in the corner: 240129.WAV. On every level, this is the right choice. The words are enough.
Collection
[
|
...
]