The desperate, sobbing pleas of a little girl, trapped in a bullet-riddled car in Gaza, echoed through the halls of the Venice Film Festival on Wednesday, shaking audiences to their core.
"The Voice of Hind Rajab," a gut-wrenching new film by Franco-Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, does not just tell a story; it resurrects a voice that the world briefly heard and then forgot.
The film, a powerful contender for the festival's top Golden Lion prize, dramatises the true events of January 2024, when five-year-old Hind Rajab Hamada became the sole survivor after Israeli forces opened fire on the car she was fleeing in with six relatives in Gaza City.
The project has drawn heavyweight Hollywood support, with Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, and Oscar-winning directors Jonathan Glazer and Alfonso Cuaron serving as executive producers.
"For me, this film was essential because when I heard the voice of Hind Rajab for the first time, there was something more than her voice," Ben Hania told reporters. "It was the very voice of Gaza asking for help and nobody could enter."
She described a narrative prevalent in global media that frames Palestinian deaths as mere "collateral damage," a term she finds profoundly "dehumanising." she asserted: "Cinema, art, and every kind of expression is very important to give those people a voice and face."
The film's narrative is built around the real, recorded phone calls between the terrified child and the Red Crescent rescue serviceaudio that caused a brief international outcry when released.
In the film, Hind's voice, captured in harrowing detail, pleads, "Please come to me, please come. I'm scared," as the sound of gunfire rages around her. The story is told through the perspective of a dramatised Red Crescent team desperately trying, and failing, to coordinate her rescue. Hind and the two emergency workers sent to save her were later found dead.
The conflict in Gaza has cast a long shadow over this year's festival. Just days ago, thousands of protesters marched to its entrance, shouting, "Stop the genocide!" An open letter calling on festival organizers to denounce the Israeli government, signed by some 2,000 cinema insiders, has gone unheeded.
For Hind's mother, Wissam Hamada, speaking to AFP by phone from famine-stricken Gaza City, the film is a desperate cry for an end to the war that has claimed, according to UN-deemed reliable figures from Gaza's Health Ministry, at least 63,633 Palestinian lives, mostly civilians.
"The whole world has left us to die, to go hungry, to live in fear and to be forcibly displaced without doing anything," Hamada said. "It's a huge betrayal."
The tension extends beyond this single film. The cinema world has been repeatedly rattled by the war since Israel launched its offensive in October 2023 in retaliation for a Hamas attack that killed 1,219 people. At the Cannes film festival in May, 370 actors and directors signed an open letter expressing shame at their industry's "passivity."
Ben Hania, who made history as the first filmmaker to represent Tunisia at the Academy Awards in 2021, said she never imagined her project would attract such stellar support. "I'm very happy, and I never in my life thought that can be possible," she said of her A-list backers, who joined after the film was completed.
As "The Voice of Hind Rajab" prepares to be Tunisia's official entry for the foreign film Oscar, it stands as a solemn monument to a life cut short and a searing indictment of the conflict that continues to rage. It is a dramatization, the director notes, but one that stays painfully "close to what they experienced." In a festival brimming with star-powered glamour, it is the voice of one small child that demands to be heard.
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