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If your idea of a good movie is a slickly-mounted feel-good story, then don’t go watch The Voice of Hind Rajab. Don’t go if you are looking for cathartic high tragedy, or a ringing paean to undying courage or preternatural fortitude. And by all means don’t go if you hope to see good slaying evil.

But no matter what you expect out of Hind Rajab, you will be shocked, perhaps shocked into silence. And shattered. It is one of the most harrowing viewing experiences you are ever likely to encounter. At least one viewer found the film numbing.

And yet it’s a supremely well-made movie, assured and poised. Director Kaouther Ben Hania has audaciously woven her narrative – for once, the word ‘narrative’ feels so utterly inappropriate here! – around an original audio track some seventy minutes long, and in doing so has created a film of inextirpable authenticity and urgency. Some film purists will no doubt quibble about this ‘hybridisation’ of technique where real-life audio holds up a staged drama, but that’s just that – quibbling.

The Voice of Hind Rajab belongs to a genre ordinarily called docudrama, and, in a docudrama, how the filmmaker chooses to shuffle her building blocks around is entirely her call. So long as she stays true to her subject, it’s only the quality of her representation that matters, not how her collage is created.

A true story from January 2024

And Ben Hania stays scrupulously true to her story – indeed a true story from January 2024. A five-year-old Palestinian girl is trapped inside a car devastated by Israeli gunfire in Gaza. Everyone in the family she was travelling with is........

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