San Francisco Frontiers - Gaza war grief features in 'devastating' new film at Venice

The Gaza conflict has been a major talking point at the 2025 Italian cinema extravaganza, with thousands of protesters marching to the gates of the event on Saturday, shouting: "Stop the genocide!"

An open letter calling on festival organisers to denounce the Israeli government has gone unheeded, but has been signed by around 2,000 cinema insiders, according to the organisers.

The screening of "The Voice of Hind Rajab" on Wednesday will showcase one of the most hotly awaited and political movies in the running for the top prize at the 11-day event.

Directed by Franco-Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania, it has attracted Pitt, Phoenix and "The Zone of Interest" director Jonathan Glazer, who have lent their support as executive producers.

"At the heart of this film is something very simple, and very hard to live with. I cannot accept a world where a child calls for help and no one comes," Ben Hania told the festival before the premiere.

Rajab was fleeing an Israeli offensive in Gaza City with her relatives in January 2024 when their car came under fire.

Left as the sole survivor in the badly damaged vehicle, her desperate pleas for help by phone -- recorded by the Red Crescent rescue service and later released -- caused brief international outrage.

Rajab was later found dead along with two Red Crescent workers who went to retrieve her.

Ben Hania reproduces the phone recordings in the film but tells the story through the eyes and ears of fictional Red Crescent operatives.

"Sometimes, what you don't see is more devastating than what you do," Ben Hania said.

- 'Stop the war' -

Venice Film Festival director Alberto Barbera has promised it will be one of the films that will "have the biggest impact on audiences and critics".

"I'm not sure how people are going to cope," one insider who worked on the movie told AFP on condition of anonymity.

Rajab's mother said she hoped that the film would help end the nearly two-year-long war, which has cost the lives of at least 63,633 Palestinians, mostly civilians, according to figures from the health ministry in Hamas-run Gaza that the United Nations deems reliable.

"I hope this film will help stop this destructive war and save the other children of Gaza," Wissam Hamada told AFP by phone from devastated, famine-hit Gaza City where she lives with her five-year-old son.

"The whole world has left us to die, to go hungry, to live in fear and to be forcibly displaced without doing anything. It's a huge betrayal," she added.

Contacted by AFP, the Israeli military said the circumstances of Rajab's death were "still being reviewed", without giving further details.

It has never announced a formal investigation into the case.

- Tensions -

The war in Gaza has regularly caused tension in the cinema world since Israel launched its offensive in October 2023 in retaliation for an attack by Palestinian militant group Hamas which left 1,219 people dead, most of them civilians.

Glazer's decision to denounce what he called Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank as he accepted his Oscar for best director for Holocaust drama "The Zone of Interest" in 2024 split the Jewish filmmaking world.

Around 370 actors and directors signed an open letter during the Cannes film festival in May saying they were "ashamed" of their industry's "passivity" about the war, including Cannes jury president Juliette Binoche.

Others have avoided taking a clear position.

This year's Venice jury president, Alexander Payne ("The Holdovers", "Sideways") said he was "unprepared" to answer a question about his views on the war last week, adding he was "here to judge and talk about cinema".

Other movies premiering on Wednesday in Venice include star-packed "In the Hand of Dante" by Julian Schnabel, a gangster story set between New York and Italy about the theft of the original manuscript of Dante Alighieri's "Divine Comedy".

It features Oscar Isaac in the lead role alongside Gerard Butler, John Malkovich, Martin Scorsese and Al Pacino.

Q.Nelson--SFF