An Oscar Nominee for Best International Feature, this gripping docudrama follows emergency volunteers attempting to rescue a five-year-old girl trapped under fire in Gaza.

January 29, 2024. Red Crescent volunteers receive an emergency call. A five-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.

Academy Award-nominated filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania spares the audience the visual horrors, instead focusing the action on the dispatch center. As with her previous documentary-drama hybrid Four Daughters, she blends the actual phone recordings, which went viral several weeks after this incident, with dramatizations of the emergency workers racing against time to coordinate paramedics who could save her.

Despite taking home the Grand Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival (after a 22-minute standing ovation) and earning an Oscar nomination for Best International Feature, the film has received criticism for Ben Hania's blend of fiction and nonfiction, which she "sets in daring oil-and-water opposition" (The New Yorker). Depending on your perspective, the film exploits the tragedy for a control-room thriller or dilutes the raw power of the real story with melodrama. But even taking this criticism into account, the director raises a question worth exploring: whether a blend like this is necessary for the full truth of this heartbreaking story to sink in.

Programmed as part of the Dartmouth Film Society series "Borders and Belonging" in collaboration with Professor Mimi Thi Nguyen's class "War and Visual Culture"

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