This is the kind of movie that will haunt you, but for very different reasons to most such movies. Gladly, I did know what I was getting myself into.

This is a movie about people in an emergency call center trying to figure out how to get a six-year-old out from a car that has been hit by IDF for funsies. She is there alone, surrounded by six bodies and since this is a warzone, there is no-one who could possibly reach the site, so they have to figure out what to do.

To achieve authenticity, the whole movie happens in the emergency call center. We never see the titular Hind Rajab but we do hear her voice and it is her voice. It’s recordings of the actual calls between the employees at the center and the kid. We also hear the gunfire and tank movement. You know, real gunfire and real tanks committing war crimes.

For additional authenticity, at times they use the call center side of the discussions as well while the actor is just on the screen, or at one point they use footage shot by the social media manager on a phone screen while the actors (who really look like the people they are playing) are in the background doing their thing.

So, if you feel you can take a six-year-old girl begging for someone to come get her, you should see this. If you feel you can’t, you should still do it. After all, this is a reality for millions of people in this are alone.

Here’s a question: Is this even fiction? I don’t know how much fiction there is. In the beginning of the movie, they tell you that it’s a dramatization of the events, so it is possible that certain things are heightened for the purposes of making a compelling movie. As if the call wasn’t enough.

For comparison, a couple of years ago, the same director, Kaouther Ben Hania, made a movie called Four Daughters. That is a categorized as a documentary, although it has many similarities in the technique. It’s about two daughters who left their home to join ISIS while two others stayed home. To explain their lives before the older two left, they hired a couple of actors to play them and hang around with the family, which kind of distorts reality. So, I guess this is a matter of degrees rather than a clear line.

Now, if you really wanted to criticize The Voice of Hind Rajab, there are ways. You could find the usage of real world recordings unnecessary. Well, I think the actual voice of Hind Rajab is a great addition, but the rest of the material is sometimes kind of awkward. It feels like the movie is trying to prove that you should take this to heart.

Also, there are points in the story where characters explain things they probably shouldn’t to their colleagues. For example, early on Omar, who is our point of view in the call center (most of the time), tells a colleague that he is now going to answer an emergency call. That colleague wouldn’t need this explanation, so it feels kind of clumsy, and similar things happen later as well.

Part of me would be more interested in the processes of running operations like this, but at the same time if they used more time on that, it would take away from the very real drama of the movie.

Did I cry? Oh, yes. And I’m fully dead inside. I can separate myself completely from anything, but I just did not want to do that here. I go to movies to feel things, and sometimes those feelings might be negative and that’s okay. Of course, I was already sympathetic to the situation of the Palestinian people but paraphrasing a quote often misattributed to Stalin, death of one is a tragedy, death of a million is a statistic. The death of Hind Rajab was not a big deal in a world where six figures worth of people die every day, but it is a much needed example of the crimes the various monstrous groups are currently committing against innocent people.