The Voice of Hind Rajab: Imperfect, But Essential

A real phone call for help made by a child in the middle of a combat zone and the dramatized reactions of her would be rescuers combined to tell a story of the horror trauma and ultimate futility of aid workers trying to save the civilian victims of genocide. The movie is called The Voice of Hinned Rajab. This podcast is called All Those Moments. I'm Benji Wade and I'm with Bunga. All those moments is a podcast where we connect social political or cultural moments with moments from our favorite movies. If you like spoiler-filled detailed conversations about movies, you have come to the right place and you should think about hitting that subscribe button, especially if you've been here before. Yeah. Luke, I often will start these episodes of All Those Moments by saying it's this one of our favorite movies. Instead, I just want to get right into the topic of this movie. This is by far going to be one of the hardest topics to talk about, the hardest subjects in terms of the movie that we're talking about. So simple film, simple structurally. Yeah, difficult to talk about. Incredibly difficult. I have now seen it twice. The movie is called The Voice of Hinned Rajab and it is a 2025 documentary drama directed by a Tunisian filmmaker named Kouther Ben Hania. It is the story of a six-year-old girl trapped in a car that has been hit by gunfire during the invasion of Gaza by the Israeli defense forces in January of 2024, which means that it was a couple months if that into the conflict in Gaza, the most recent conflict of which everybody who's listening to this we hope is aware is happening. The girl makes an emergency call to an organization called the Red Crescent Volunteers, pleading for her rescue while trying to keep her on the line. They do everything they can to get an ambulance to her. Her name was Hinned Rajab. Rajab stays on the phone with emergency dispatchers for hours as they struggle to reach her through active combat while trying to keep her on the line. The movie uses 70 minutes of real-life phone calls that were made by the real little girl named Hinned Rajab while she was trapped in this car, but it has a cast of actors portraying the Red Crescent Volunteers who took part in the real-life events depicted in the movie. It features the following actors, Mothaz, Malhees, Asm Omar, Sajja, Kilani, Asrana, Amir, Clechle, Asmadi, and Clara, Kuri, As Nisreen. I'm sure I have butchered every one of those pronunciations. But I'm doing a lot of Madi's name again. The actor's name. Amir, Clechle. That's pretty good. I looked it up. The gutter rolls. I mean, it's good. I'm going to do what I saw was that it has like a dramatic cluck. So I was like, I think I can probably go for that. The movie has similarities to another film that was made by Kouther Ben Hania called Four Daughters which came out in 2023. It was nominated for an Oscar that year. Also a docu-drama. It is about a Tunisian mother of four whose two eldest daughters are radicalized by ISIS and they leave their family. Oh, I think I heard about this movie. I never watched it. It uses a similar conceit to the voice of Hinned Rajab which I mentioned at the outset of this that uses 70 minutes of actual recordings of the phone calls of Hinned Rajab. That's what the movie voice of Hinned Rajab is structured around. Four daughters is a story about a mother and her four daughters in Tunisia. The eldest two are radicalized online. They leave to Libya to join ISIS. Ben Hania hires two professional actors to portray the eldest daughters in a retelling of the events of what happened to their family. Alongside the mother, the actual mother and her two youngest daughters. In both examples, it's this therapeutic, cathartic way of framing these incredibly harrowing stories. I saw the trailer to it and I was like, oh boy, this is another buckle up movie. I really want to see it. Might as well say now that the voice of Hinned Rajab was nominated for Best Foreign Film for the upcoming 2026 Oscars. In the same category, I think, is Four Daughters. The movie that we just covered, no other choice, was picked up and distributed by Neon. Neon would have run the field with all five foreign film nominations for the 2026 Oscars, except the voice of Hinned Rajab got in over no other choice. Interesting. Which is super, super fascinating. Maybe we'll come back to that at the end. But I want to give, like, not a spoiler warning look, but a kind of trauma warning. Only because I don't judge what other people choose to do with their time in any aspect of life, including what movies they decide to watch. And this is a very, very difficult watch goes without saying, I think, you heard me describe the log line. I'm not trying to make light of the situation, but I think you do mock people's choices, frequently in private. Yeah, I might privately judge you if you're not willing to watch this, but in truth, there are things in this movie that if you are a sensitive person, especially if you've experienced anything that even approaches the subject matter, I could completely understand why this would be a very difficult thing to watch. So that said, we are going to go into the story of what happened to the six year old girl. We're going to go into the details of this movie, plot specifics, etc. You and I did not watch this movie together. This is a, this was a unique experience for this podcast where we typically watch the movies together, because you just watched the movie. Yeah. I watched it on Valentine's Day with my wife Ray. It's a choice. It's a choice. Hey, afterward, I think my wife who's so wise described this movie in some ways as a meditation on love and we'll come back to that. You said something like, I don't know how I'm going to talk about this. And I think you were alluding to just trying to separate in some way the real life story of what happened to this six year old girl in Rajab, as well as like the storytelling, the filmmaking, the way that this was produced, etc. We also want to be really honest with anyone listening to this or viewing this on YouTube or Spotify that this is the morning after 11 o'clock last night when I was going to bed, it was announced and I saw the news come across my timeline that Israel and the United States and combines to attack Iran. So the timing of us doing this podcast, if the subject matter of the voice of Henry job wasn't difficult enough, we're also sitting here as our these two rogue states is how I'm going to describe Israel United States right now. Or just going to war with any buddy with impunity, I just want to say right now part of the way I would like to honor Henry job and this movie is by not getting too distracted by geopolitics and focusing on the story that's told and depicted in intimate detail in this movie. So I think that's a good way to start. I think while we're talking about what's the legacy of this film, I do think we're going to have to talk about that a little bit because we should also say just briefly. We think 80 plus school kids died in part of this bombing. So this is a story about one school aged child dying and we are living in real time through a entire school. A girl school, by the way, yeah. And probably a supreme leader, I told a how many. Yep. So it was being confirmed as we were walking in here, walking in. So as far as we know, the Israeli government has said how many is dead. Yeah. So that's just got me thinking even more about the nature of art in 2026 and what power it actually has. Yeah. The real life events that are depicted in this story are beyond horrific as early as like the first month of conflict in Gaza before it was quite obviously a genocide by most definitions. There were war crimes being committed by Israel. And I think one of the reasons we are going to go over the details of this story and I want to do this in intimate detail is because that is exactly what hasn't happened with the conflict in Gaza, which now is being correctly described as a genocide. Most of it is viewed from the greatest possible distance, social media. I think we mentioned together on the Eddington episode that we're all living through this kind of milgram experiment, which is reflected in our attitudes towards social media. You see something disturbing, you just swipe away. You don't actually have to engage in any of the things that are being done with our taxpayer money as Americans, right? So everything's depicted at the greatest possible distance both emotionally and physically. And this is a podcast where we talk about movies and whether or not they're successful to us artistically. Yeah. We mentioned that there will be no kid glow treatments to certain aspects of the production. It is not a perfectly well made movie. It has flaws, but it also has for every flaw. It has several things that I think are really beautiful about it. It's an incredibly provocative way of telling a story of what happened to Henry job. And I want to save some thoughts about the movie. It's producers, the reception of it for the end of the podcast. So unless you have anything else you want to add, let's say. I think we should just dive in. Let's take a quick break and we come back. We're going to dive into all the moments from this movie. The story begins in the headquarters of Luke was talking about this group called the Red Crescent Society. Kind of the equivalent of Red Cross, even though the Red Cross is an international organization, which does come up in this movie as well. Yeah. You see a group of volunteers that are at a call center in Ramallah, which is in the West Bank about 10 miles from Jerusalem, about 50 miles from Gaza. The events of the movie take place in the southern part of Gaza City. Dispatchers at the Red Crescent are on a call. We later find out is Henry Jobs, 15-year-old cousin. She's inside of a car that's in the research. restricted zone within Gaza City about a quarter mile from their home. Her family's trying to evacuate, but it feels like I didn't read this and I kind of interpreted just reading between the lines that they just got caught a little bit late to trying to evacuate. That's what it seems like, yeah. You hear gunfire, there's a 15 year old girl, she starts screaming and then the call drops. So she's talking to Omar. This is the first really important phone call that's depicted in the movie and I just want to say right now that is having watched this twice. Yes, I watched this movie twice. That was one of the hardest things I've ever seen or listened to. Right? I'm watching this moment depicted and I'm listening to this audio and it is really, really excruciating. And it's also the first time you see Omar who's portrayed by Mottaz Malhe says the actor and he repeatedly calls out hello, hello, hello, his eyes start to well up. The line is silent and this is how we experience like the events throughout the rest of the movie. He's real life recordings of the voice of the six year old girl in Rajab and her interactions with these actors that are the dispatchers at Red Crescent. The camera hangs for a really long time on Omar and it's, I think it's the first time where you really get to go, does this work? And my feeling, I'm curious what yours was Luke was, not only is this worthwhile for this movie to be made and it's an incredibly important, important thing to make a movie like this, but I felt very affected by it too. Because I felt this kind of contiguousness between the actor playing the part of this real life person and the person that they're playing that they get to basically be in that space. There are times when Ben Hania makes these choices to sort of break the fourth wall or sometimes when the actors who are playing the characters are sitting silent while the old, the audio from the actual people who experienced it play just for brief moments. And it's unclear at first actually if that's just a stylistic choice. There's a moment later on where Rana is like listening back to the recording, but you could tell it's not, it's not the voice of the actress. It's maybe the original voice of the real life Rana. This is one of the most brilliant things about the movie to me. I had no problem having seen it twice. There's only one I think moment. I didn't catch it. I'm curious if you caught it. The second time viewing it of when it goes from being the real life person to the recording of that real life person that they're portraying because what you're describing is like Rana's voice will then intersect in the edit or cross cut with the real voice of Rana. And as if you were the actor and the real life person and I didn't have a hard time distinguishing between the two. And I thought that was a brilliant piece of editing. Yeah. And then Rana the actress, I think like the real life Omar and the actor, Matas, does a great job. He's a really, really skilled actor, but his voice doesn't sound that much like the real Omar. I thought the Rana actresses more so sounded pretty. Yeah. Omar and the other volunteers at this point, they don't know the name of Henry Jobs cousin, but I want to say it now. Her name was Leon. Omar calls back a small frightened voice answers, Hanude Rajab is her name, Hint for short. And her first words are stay with me. There's no time. There's no one with me. He's joined by his supervisor, Rana. And then they both end up on the call with Hint. Another volunteer coordinator whose name is Mati, his job is to gather information about whether or not they should attempt to make the rescue. So they call. So Omar, I think is like a call center worker. Rana is his supervisor. Mati is like the dispatcher who's supposed to be the one, wherever this is happening in Gaza, who's helping find the ambulance. We'll talk more about the coordination between the various governments and non-governmental organizations that we're going through. Yeah. And this relationship, I think, is established from the jump is quite tense between Omar and Mati. There's a moment where he, Omar's friends with one of the EMTs that's on the ground in Gaza City. And then the name is Yusuf, and he's like, I'm just going to call him. This is probably as good a time as any to say the kind of role, which I'm glad that you surface this, that Omar, whether or not he was like this in real life, he does serve a kind of narrative function, but almost kind of like that. The doofus. Yeah, he ends up being kind of the doofus who can just be like, I'm new here. I don't understand. Why is this this way? I'm sure it wasn't like this in real life. Mati is presented as like this ultimate bureaucrat rules follower. Everything has to be done by the book in coordination with these intergovernmental agencies, as well as we can squint a little bit the army. The word army is used and every time it's used, it's meant to represent the Israeli defense force. Okay. So to get back to the story, Rana and Omar call backhand. They are confused about who's in the car with her. Hand is confused. She's scared. She's clearly in shock. She says she's next to her cousin Sarah who's covered in blood. And she describes her as sleeping. Sleeping, yeah. We can hear gunfire and tank movement near her. And she describes that she can see a tank at this point. And we later learn that everyone in the car with hand is dead. Six people. Six people. Her aunt, her uncle, her four cousins who were age 9, 11, 13 and 15. The idea that they were scrambling to get out of Gaza City. The fact that there were seven people in this vehicle speaks to that. This vehicle I'll come back to at the end. I'll just tell you right now, not intended for seven passengers. For the first time we hear audio of the real life Rana. And she says, you're the only one who's awake. No one else is moving, covered in blood. In shouts back, yes, they're covered in blood. Please help me. I'm all alone. The full weight of what's happening in this story drops not just on the dispatchers at this point. It's both the actors who are portraying them and the voices of the real people and the audience. I think it's at that point that I'm already starting to kind of feel a little dead inside. Just at the anger and the sadness and the anguish and how excruciating this is. But I'm like, I'm hanging. It's minute 15 maybe of the movie at this point. Hens stop saying at this point a few minutes later she stops saying that they're asleep. It's almost like she's convincing herself as a six year old wood that they're sleeping. And at this point she shouts, I said they're dead, they're all dead. They're only dead bodies. It's my whole family. [BLANK_AUDIO] They're asking for details about who's in the car. The family. And I'm like, why are they trying to keep her distracted? They're also trying to likely identify. And again, as we know, we don't know how many of these bodies that are plowed under the rubble in Gaza have even been retrieved. So they're also trying to at the same time, they're trying to save this child. They're also trying to catalog the dead. And we also learn later that they're trying to build their case to the Ministry of Health, to the IDF that there's a worthwhile rescue that needs to be attempted. And then eventually public opinion, because they start posting on social media. [MUSIC] They kind of already know her broad location. They're trying to just confirm that they're identifying or they're asking, where's the ambulance at right now, which is it at the Baptist hospital or this other hospital. They attempt to secure clearance through military channels, well through the Red Cross. And through military channels, to allow rescue crews to these areas. The tension builds not through action, but kind of through the lack of it, the bureaucratic delay, fragmented information. Modi becomes Omar's whipping boy for the bureaucratic red tape up the channel. And also we kind of need to say that at the very end of this chain is the Israeli defense forces who did not seem particularly concerned about preserving human life. So they're finding another pale battle no matter what, and Omar sort of from his limited view has nobody to yell at except Modi. The round trips he keeps making into the office, I will say having watched this twice, I wish they had done something else to mix up this part of the storytelling. I think it took me out just a little bit to just be like, he's going back in there, he's ringing his hands, he's slamming his fist or whatever, he's shouting, he's doing the marker on the window. Modi finally pulls Omar aside and reminds him of the stakes if they don't go through all these bureaucratic leaps that there's a wall of red crescent humanitarian work martyrs. It literally says that. And it's photos of people and he goes through them one at a time and says, yeah, you see her, four children, this guy, two children. This woman was just recently engaged. Yeah. The only thing that's really is they can go through every hurdle they're supposed to go through and present the best possible case of why this attempted attempted rescue should be made. And still they're at the whims of some IDF lieutenant, which is what happened in the case of this particular incident. Who doesn't give a shit and doesn't care about preserving the life of civilian civilians living in Gaza. And honey, it didn't need to make Omar this like I rate in order to get the point across for me. And it also feels just a little bit weird. It's like, yeah, your buddy could easily be on that martyr wall. You've already talked to your friends. It does feel like a proxy for the audience in a way that doesn't, it doesn't, I don't want to say it feels disingenuous, but it doesn't entirely work. Yeah. So there's a point later on where, where Modi more completely describes the channels that they go and he just, he's like, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, I'm going to say, draws it like an infinity sign, which I thought was actually, I liked the section. I thought this was really good. Yeah. So there then, the modi is sort of left to be the exposition a little bit of like, here's why we don't just rush into these war zones. Hind is over here. We have to talk to, I think it's Red Cross. Yeah. And then maybe if not Red Cross, maybe we go to the Gaza Health Authority or the Ministry of Health. The Ministry of Health. Yeah. And then there's, I think there was another intermediary. And then there's the Israeli Defense Forces. And then even if the Israeli Defense Forces say, yeah, here's, so there's, there's two things they're trying to do. They're trying to get permission from the IDF to go in, but they're also trying to find a safe route through the rubble and stuff that is also sort of up to the IDF to tell them which way to go. So you obviously have to go back through the process and wait for the green light. So he, what he ends, is he's describing this and drawing this, drawing this diagram, then the camera sort of shows a shot from the other side of the wall. And it's, he's drawn an infinity sign. Basically, like, this is the endless permutations we have to go through to even say of a single child. And who knows how long it's going to take, it could take forever. And I thought that was a, I loved it. I thought it was great. And it's where Omar's function, as depicted in the movie, I think was really, it was well executed because he's asking that kind of question that allows, even if the real life Omar was very well, very, totally, it allows Mardi to go, I want to show the audience the tension of this kind of dialectic between total fucking absurdity and the pathos of what's happening to this little girl. If you don't come away from watching something like the voice of Henry Job, and at least reckoning with the storytelling of what actually happened, even if you don't watch this movie, and you aren't expressly and completely for the rest of your life anti-war, then I just can't relate to you. It's at this section that I kind of described as feeling like something out of Finnegan's wake or waiting for a go. It's got this absurd element of the bureaucracy, totally absurd, bureaucratic functions when there's a six-year-old girl whose entire family's been murdered, and she's in this car, and they have to ask permission from all these different entities. And then ultimately, the entity that's committing these barbaric acts, they have to ask them for permission. Right. The middle section of the movie, I will just say, is totally agonizing. We know the stakes. We know the circumstances of the little girl. She's trapped in a car with these six bloody bodies of her family. There's no food or water in the car. In confirms that it was a tank that fired up the car and that it's still near her. She can see it outside the vehicle that she's trapped in. The calls with HINN'd end up dropping and reconnecting repeatedly. She ends up sharing personal details about her school life with the dispatchers. This is one of the most challenging bits to sit through. Yeah. You've got it in the notes. Yeah. Really difficult. She tells Omar when he asks the name of her school. Her school is called a happy childhood. She asks when help is coming. The dispatchers reassure her repeatedly. And that's their only function at this point. And this is when Ray, my wife, who I watched this movie with, on Valentine's Day said that this is to her a meditation on love when I was even saying to her afterwards, they were like, well, happy Valentine's Day, babe. And she's like, well, that movie was a meditation of love. And she was describing how the last moments, the last three hours on Earth for this little girl were these dispatchers trying to save her, but also trying to communicate with her to hold her in love through their speech, through speaking into this phone call, and asking her things about her and trying to help her feel like a little girl for the last few hours. I gotta be careful talking about this. Her fear kind of fluctuates between a kind of calm obedience and a child like panic as it should. Outside the car she's in, you can hear the sounds of gunfire and tanks. I feel like the approach from Couser Ben Hania as the director is to just basically allow the actors the room to occupy the same emotional space. I described it as a kind of contiguousness between the real life person they're portraying and then occupying their own role, but also bringing their own personal backgrounds. While listening, I would imagine from a technique perspective, I haven't confirmed any of this, but that they were probably sitting there literally on set listening to the voice of Henry job. It is pure anguish. It's unthinkable heartbreak. Rhonda begins to pray with hand. The dispatchers are given, they finally are given photographs ever to the point you were earlier talking about with the wall. Omar continues to tell Marty of how long they've been on the phone. Just to like digging a little bit on the love thing that Ray mentioned, she starts calling them Uncle and Aunt. Would you think it's like a cultural thing, but that is like clearly like, right now we are family, right? Like we are here, I'm your auntie. And there's different times where they're trying to explain to this little girl what's happening, one of which is like, why isn't the ambulance coming yet? And they're like, explain it to her like it's a family. We're like, well, Omar, you know, Marty is our dad. And he's trying to talk to the army dad to get the army to not let us come. Let your aunts and uncles come in and help you. And the aunts and uncles are of course, the ambulance rescuers. - Oh, I love that you're saying this because I think that they're dynamic in the way that these red crescent volunteers interact with each other. - Very much like a family. They all want the same things. They're gonna fight each other at times. They're gonna yell at each other. They might even hit each other. When they're, but they're all pulling in the same direction. So it has the dynamics of a family, the way that they operate through this entire crisis. - And you get a sense that these red crescent workers are also being like, well, you know, in the sense that like extended family can be, or extended community can be family. Like we are the standins for these, you know, tightening family units now that a big chunk of this family has been killed. - So at this point, Maudi's hands completely tied by layers upon layers of bureaucracy. He's got the red crescent, red cross, red tape. Lording over all of it is the Israeli military. Hens says that she's hurt and that she's bleeding. And Omar describes that to Maudi and Maudi says, "Oh, you should post that. You should publish that." Maudi tells Omar to post this to social media that she's hurt and she's bleeding in Omar immediately. And I thought this is one of the most brilliant parts of the movie, the way it was performed, the idea behind it, maybe it happened in real life, it doesn't really matter, but Omar mocks Maudi immediately and says, "Great idea." And I'll be sure to post it in English. And then he shows Maudi his phone and he's scrolling through all these, we've all seen him. Anybody especially on Twitter? - Well, those are dead bodies here. - Especially on Twitter, but also TikTok before the Ellison spot TikTok. And he says, he's going through horrifying images from God's end, just scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. And he says, "Children's bodies ripped apart on the side of the road. Do you really think the voice of a terrified girl will spark their empathy? She needs an ambulance. He follows and screams the rescue team. Omar, Maudi, Rana, Nisreen, they go back and forth for like 20 minutes. This is back to this idea. Very much like a family dynamic. - This is like a third of the film, basically. - Totally. They're arguing, they're yelling. Then they go to consoling each other. They go through every stage of grief with one another. They think that they've lost contact with him because at this point, she stops talking. Maudi is then worried because back to the earlier point, he's putting together this package of information to get this green light to attempt the rescue. And he speculates this means that they won't get the green light for the ambulance rescue if she stops talking. - Well, but also though, right before he says that, Maudi tells whoever he's talking to on the other line, she's stopped talking. - That was the one moment where it was like, "Oh, I don't even know if Maudi might be so traumatized." Maybe he doesn't want to even send the ambulance without anymore. - I feel like he was just consistent about, I don't, I think he was already so cynical about the likelihood that the ambulance wouldn't actually get to its destination and to actually save his life. I think he was like, I just don't want to lose more friends. I don't want to lose more humanitarian workers. Niz Rene steps in, who is the counselor. I think you described accurately. - I think she's like a grief counselor for the workers. - Yeah, she begins to speak into the phone and more or less go through like a guided meditation cutting between, and it cuts between the real life recording of Niz Rene and the actor that's portraying her. And she says, "Close your eyes, remember the sea, the sun shining on the sea." And it has this moment also where the other dispatch, the other dispatchers, the other volunteers, including Rana are sitting in there being guided through this meditation as well. And it's affecting them. Rana actually looks at peace for just a second and her eyes start to close. (singing in foreign language) (sniffing) - It's interesting, as you're sort of describing this part, I don't think I would have like sat on this, but it almost feels like, and this is gonna be hard to say. And maybe this is part of what Omar can't wrap his head around and maybe Maudi can't wrap his head around is, man, like at that point where you've gathered all the information, it's really unclear if this infinity loop is ever gonna be resolved in a positive way. - Yeah, I think I know what you're saying. - It's almost like these aid workers are doing palliative care. - Dude, I know. - Almost like hospice. - Yeah, last experience on Earth for HEN was talking to these dispatchers, Rhana Omar and Nisreen. She says, "Close your eyes, remember the sea, the sun shining on the sea, how you played in the water and sand." Eventually, HEN calls out and starts speaking again. Nisreen introduces herself because HEN's confused. I think she thinks that she might be Rhana in pleads and she's crying and says, "Save me." We go back to Maudi and Maudi says, "I still don't have a green light." (upbeat music) - So this is one of those moments where it's like, this felt almost like a stage play. 'Cause Omar gets really upset. - Not in a good way. - And for, yeah, he ends up hucking his phone and we don't see where the phone hits. It just like lands off screen. And then all the lights in the building go out. Like he hit the breaker box or something. It was really strange. - Oh, I forgot about this. Yeah. - Yeah. So it's like then for that next section of the film, they're in darkness. And that's why it feels like a little theatrical in the sense of like, it's a physical change to the set that's meant to sort of like represent the darkness that's descending on their souls maybe or something like that. But it just felt like, for something that's so sort of, has been very realism, like realistic at this point. Doing something like that just felt a little off. - Well, and the very, very, very least realistic part of the movie then happens, which I bumped on. Both times watching this, I just gotta be honest. They go to different sections of the building. This is a moment I'd argue to describe it. It's just like a little-- - They're playing war games on the-- - A lull in activity in the storytelling. Motti ends up in the bathroom. I think Omar's in a different room. And then they start playing a video game together over a network apparently on their phones. - It looks like Fortnite. - Fortnite or Call of Duty or something. - Yeah. - It really hit me as this did not need to be in the movie. (laughing) (crashing) (crashing) - Excellent. (crashing) - It's like they're way of breaking Brad and being like, "Hey, everything's okay. Let's go get some headshots on (beep) and call of duty." And so inauthentic that you hear like these weird audio cues of-- - Excellent. (crashing) - Yeah. (crashing) - It's a bloop. - Yeah. - It's another reason that was just like jarring. Like what is the actual relationship between Omar and Motti? Because it seems like Omar's brand new, you know? And then yeah, like this moment, it's like this is a game they've played together countless times, right? - There's a dozen different ways you could have shown them sort of capitulating and breaking Brad and reconnecting. And I think that would have been at the bottom of my list. This shit didn't work but whatever. - So then they finally do get the green light. So the two, the two drivers of the ambulance or the two workers in the ambulance are dispatched. And again, it is about an eight minute drive. And you see on the screen there's basically like a Google map stand-in where they've got the chart, the course charted and you can see the little thing. It looks a little bit like Uber Eats. They're finally sent. And that's when all of a sudden there's some hope. You've seen some hope on Omar's face. I even-- - I felt for it. - Sort of detected some hope on Motti's face, which is not, you know, like that's where you get a little bit of like, it was, I think Motti was the hardest character for me to relate to personally because of that, you know. 'Cause I think they could have done a better job of helping us understand why he was so traumatized by all of the people he's basically led to death through this process. And then you're picturing if we've seen pictures of Gaza, it's like can we even tell what are streets anymore? Because of all the rubble. So they're having to do this delicate navigational balance, but they get there. And then the dispatchers do ask him to confirm that she sees the ambulance and she doesn't. The last words from the MTs and the ambulance, there she is. And then we hear the sound of gunfire on the call. They ask, "Can if she heard the gunfire," she says, "Yes." There's no further response from the ambulance. - And this is where I personally bottomed out, like Ronna earlier when she fainted. I was near that point as a viewer of the story. Because I don't think if I can remember my sort of emotional space watching it the first time. Mostly, I feel like I felt a lot of anger, more than just sadness about the fact that this is happening, about our taxpayer money, all those kinds of things. I start feeling angry at Americans for voting for this stuff to happen. It's the two different times in the movie where there's an audio cue that just completely flattened me. And this was the second. The first was Lyon when the tank fire happens and the call drops early on in the movie. And this time when you kind of know, "We've been through this." That just meant that the two EMTs were likely killed. - Yeah. We think that the ambulance has been destroyed, but Omar is still on the phone, or the whole crew is on the phone with a hit now. And Omar repeats, "Did you hear the gunfire earlier?" Hint says, "Yes." And his rein asks Hint, "Ask Hint. If she sees anybody trying to rescue her." Hint says, "No." The last line we hear on the call is from Hint's mom, who has been, so she's actually been patched in with just two different cell phones, I think, with the speakers sort of put close to each other. - That's correct, right? - I mean, as twice. - I think it was actually Hint's mom. - You see Hint's, you see somebody calling somebody else, and that one is actually Hint's mom. So I think at that point, they're like, we need to try to get this mom to basically - Yeah, it makes it their daughter. - It makes me think that they must have been attempting in the hours leading up to this moment in real life - To connect with the mom. - To connect with Hint's mother. - Yeah. - And that they finally were successful, and she got a chance to talk to Hint. - Yeah, and she says, "I'll be waiting for you, sweetie, my love, my darling mom is love." The movie then fades to black. And after that last expression from Hint's mom, this is where we, the dramatization of the movie ends. It fades back in and we see Hint's real life mother and her little brother, and they're being interviewed about what happened. It's just conventional interview setup. - Yeah, it looks like a documentary. - It does. It becomes a purely non-fiction film at this point. And we learned that it took 12 days, once the idea withdrew from this invasion of Gaza to discover what happened to Hint and the EMTs who attempted to rescuer. It ends with some real life video of the aftermath of Israel's attack on Gaza, including the fact that an investigation was done that showed 335 bullets had hit the car of the Hamada family. And so this is her family, her extended family, with Hint Rajab inside with her six family members. The body of Hint Rajab was recovered and found inside the car with her relatives. The entire family, seven people, including Hint Rajab. They were in a car, it was a Kia Pocanto, which is a compact four-door hatchback. Similar to the car I drive. I drive a Honda Fitts four-door hatchback. It's tiny. The idea of putting seven people in it, I don't know how I would even attempt that. And so it suggests to me again that-- - They're just piling as many people as they can and they were scrambling to get out of Gaza City. - It looks like the front, so the actual archival, the documentary footage of the recovery workers, not rescue workers, but at this point, we're 12 days later and everybody's dead. Looking at the scene, it almost looks like a bigger car. I thought it was a minivan at first. - Yeah, I did do. I did do. - The front is crushed. So maybe the tank rolled over this thing. We don't know, or I got hit by some sort of explosive ordinance 'cause the ambulance is absolutely nuked. There's all twisted metal. It exploded clearly. - It's obliterated. - It's obliterated. - Inconclusive evidence suggested that it was destroyed by anti-tank ordinance. - Yeah, that was-- - Fire from a tank. The EMTs who died were named Ahmed and Yusuf. Israel claimed that there were not any troops present in the neighborhood and denied carrying out the attack. However, this was refuted by the Washington Post and Sky News. Satellite imagery and visual evidence showed that a number of Israeli tanks were indeed present. And one had likely fired 335 rounds on the car that Rajab and her family had been in with tank operators being able to see that the car had civilians including children in it. The forensic architecture investigation concluded that an Israeli tank had also likely attacked the ambulance that came for him, Rajab. I don't know about you, Luke. The end of the movie completely knocked the wind out of me. I keep expressing gratitude on our podcast for these filmmakers like Ariaster, Park Chanwook, our most recent episode about no other choice. For making these incredibly punishing movies about difficult subjects, does it change things and to back to your trying to define art if nobody watches? Because as much as I think this was made for and kind of cultivated for a Western audience, I think I agree with that assertion. What does it mean if people don't watch it? - Yeah. - We don't have a monoculture anymore, right? So like nobody was gonna respond to this movie the way that people responded to say like, "Shindler's List" or something like that, right? 'Cause they just aren't that many. This is not a large, this is not as big of a movie as that. - It's not an English language either. - It's a religion. - It's a religion. - But then if you're, you can't also then think about this in the vacuum, if we don't have a monoculture, then you can't judge the efficacy of a piece of, and this is not a political film, like the tone is not political, but it has a rhetorical, it's like, we should stop this violence. And like, is that gonna work in the age of TikTok? Well, maybe it'll work for some people. Maybe it'll work for people of a certain age who are still seeing foreign films in America, right? - Well, until doing this podcast, if I'm being completely honest, I don't think I would have seen this movie. Certainly wouldn't have seen it in the movie theater. Watching this in the movie theater meant I couldn't press pause, I couldn't look away, I couldn't scroll past it. I liked this quote from Greek filmmaker, Yoros Luntimos said, "This essential film encapsulates the horrific state of the world today, but at the same time manages to reveal that if there's any hope it lies in the humanity of those that are deprived of theirs." - I'll just say like Old Hollywood, right? Like people who do remember when film was a monoculture and like, you know, people whose careers were built on everybody's talking about going to the movies, saying like, well, what can we do as actors as filmmakers? I guess we have to help make a film about, you know what I mean? And I think that's actually, I don't know how successful this is gonna be or how many people's minds it's gonna change, but like when you feel helpless, doing what you know how to do, feels like a pretty good way to rather than just wallowing in the helplessness, you know? I don't know. - If nothing else, what Kouther Ben Hania has succeeded in doing is creating a trace, creating a record, taking those 70 minutes of recorded audio recordings of Henry job, and creating a document, an artistic document out of it that means she isn't, she's no longer gonna be men-re-hulled. So speaking of the director, Kouther Ben Hania, she recently was the recipient of an award in Berlin at what's called the cinema for Peace Gala. This happened right down the road from the Berlin International Film Festival, which we'll have notes on as well. And she refused the award and had this to say, this is just a crib of the full thing that she said. Tonight in Berlin, there are people who gave political cover to that genocide by reframing the mass civilian killing as self-defense or as complex circumstances, by denigrating those who protest, but as you may know, Peace is not a perfume sprayed over violence, so power can feel refined and can feel comfortable. And cinema is not just image-laundering. If we can speak about Peace, we must also speak about justice. In attendance at this event though, and our upside down (beep) world, Hillary Clinton and Kevin Spacey. Down the road at the Berlin International Film Festival, Neil Patrick Harris and Vim Vender, Neil Patrick Harris and Vim Venders, Vim Venders being one of the organizers of the Berlin International Film Festival. - German filmmaker. - Film Festival, Berlin all, yeah. We're among others who declined to say anything about Gaza. Neil Patrick Harris went and made a complete dumbass of himself, made a bunch of comments, including saying, "I just wanna make a political art, and I ask myself, or you, Luke, where is the hope? I have to ask myself this because I wanna be able to talk to my young daughters about the world and about our country and our collective, including mine, complicitness, and what's happening." And I always come back to this, and I think this feels a little generic, but I'll just say it here, until we're in a position as a country to overthrow citizens united as a starting point, until there's a political party that represents real actionable opposition to Maga. I don't have a lot of hope, I really don't. I sometimes feel like Monsu, the character, in no other choice at the end, where he just-- - Surrounded by robots. - Surrounded by robots, and he finds his little bits of ephemeral joy on planet Earth, but it's on a day like today, where Israel and the United States combines to attack Iran. I don't feel particularly hopeful, being honest, especially when Democrats are many of them on board with what's happening. - To this day. - To this day. - Yeah. - You know, I think, I wish I had anything hopeful to say. I get very tough. - Something could be sort of a parallel moment, and this is why I kinda wanna spend a lot of time in the future, and I just on this podcast, thinking about what is the point of art, and what is the point of mass appeal art, in an increasingly fragmented world? Maybe it's gonna take different things. To, like, Dr. Strange Love isn't gonna turn all of them-- The way that Dr. Strange Love was something that entered the social consciousness against war-mongering in the '60s, and nuclear proliferation and stuff. That's just not gonna happen. Maybe we just need to see this from a million different angles because of our fragmentarian media environment, and because we're all fragmented, polarized people, we don't gather in community with each other. We've lost the ability to sort of humanize difference in a way that's important. Like, there's a lot of talk in civic spaces, and really, this is a lot of coming from, like, leftist organizing is like, just go meet your neighbor that has the mega sign out front, just to humanize you and humanize that person. - Yeah. I'm not helping myself or anybody by being too cynical. So I will say that if we are ever going to course correct, it happens slowly, once up at a time. Nobody wants this war in Iran. No Americans want this war in Gaza. Nobody wants to be funding the wars that are never ending in the Middle East and are led by Israel. It's what I wanna do and why I feel committed to doing this podcast is just to respond to movies, respond to art, with you, my friend, to have conversations like this one. And to be thankful and grateful to filmmakers like Kouther Ben Hanya or Park Chanwook or Ari Aster or Amy Berg. I love talking about movies, and I'm so glad we get to do it on this podcast together. - And that's so it's not gonna be the hammer swing of progress, like the old Apple commercial from 1984. - Yeah, right. The world's not gonna change in a single piece of media or in a single political decision. - Or one election cycle. - Yeah. - Even if the Democrats grow a spine, they're probably gonna win in the midterm. Does that, is that gonna mean anything? Things that feel hegemonic, things that feel impossible to just break apart can also crumble quickly. Political power shifts faster than it ever has, a little bit in my opinion. - And anytime there's a movie like the voice of Hinderjab that comes out, go to the cinema and experience these works of art that are challenging, that are provocative, that have something to say. You might not entirely agree with what they have to say, but at least experience them and so I look forward to continuing to do that with this podcast. All right, let's wrap up this episode of all those moments in our conversation about the voice of Hinderjab. I cannot more strongly recommend everybody watch this movie, especially Americans. We're gonna take a break from really difficult media and we're gonna do an Oscars Watch Party on March 15th for people who are local, they can come hang out with us and do that, but our next movie is gonna be Piki Blinders, which is coming out on Netflix soon. - I mean, I don't know. I'm a little upset that you're saying that the life and times of Tommy Corley are not gonna be a tough watch, but that man lived through some stuff. - That is true, yeah. And it is based on some real stuff, but I think it'll be positively breezy compared to No other choice and certainly the voice of Hinderjab. - Yeah. - I am not going to watch all six seasons. I stopped after season two of Piki Blinders. So I'm just gonna go watch all the YouTube recaps of seasons three through six so that I go in knowing what's happening. - That'll be interesting to talk about, wait, what's the point of a capstone movie, like all saints of Newark and stuff that came out after Sprano's? But then also, you haven't seen the whole series. I think I might be able to close the gap. I think I might have missed the last season, but maybe I could go watch the whole thing and that could just be the difference. - I watched the trailer for Piki Blinders in the movie and I'll be honest with you, I do not think I'm gonna end up liking this movie. So whatever, maybe it'll be like House of Dynamite. Like hey, Netflix, sometimes you make House of Dynamite, sometimes you make train dreams. This might not be one that lands for me and I look forward to chatting about it. Please follow the show on YouTube or Spotify. They both have video now. You could also get lots of updates, clips from the podcast or send us a DM on our Instagram page. That's gonna do it for this episode of all those moments. Thank you to the Magic Lantern. Thank you for listening or watching. And thank you Luke. Thanks Benji. (upbeat music) All those moments will be lost in time. (upbeat music) Right time to die.