I watched the Oscars Sunday night knowing The Voice of Hind Rajab was not going to win. The Academy has always ratified what’s already safe to feel. Sunday was no different. The film, for all its standing ovations and its Brad Pitts and its 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, was never Academy material — and the truth is it should not have been. Both of these things are true. Hold them and bear with me.
The responses since then have split into typical camps: those who believe the film was robbed, that an Oscar would have meant something, that the snub is proof of Hollywood’s complicity. There are also those who say the film already won with its record-breaking standing ovation at Venice. To both groups, with love and with the impatience of someone who has been watching us settle: You are both wrong. We cannot afford to keep being wrong in these ways.
I went into the movie thinking about some of the conversations I have been having with Palestinian colleagues and want here to synthesize some important critiques.
The Voice of Hind Rajab is set entirely inside a Red Crescent dispatch room in Ramallah. The drama — and there is genuine drama — unfolds between the call center workers trying to figure out what the best protocol for the emergency is. They argue about routing procedures and chain of command, about who has authority to dispatch the ambulance. They also sweat as they determine which route is approved and whether it is safe and legal enough to send someone to a child bleeding alone in a car surrounded by her dead cousins. As the story builds, the paperwork grows and grows to gradually become the film’s antagonist.
