The “Voice of Hind Rajab” got a 23-minute record ovation, Brad Pitt, Rooney Mara and Joaquin Phoenix supporting the film. Yorgos Lanthimos wore a Palestinian flag-pin, a record thousands protested at the opening and 1500 cine-artists signed a Venice4Palestine letter. No more no politica?
By Eirini PolydorouYesterday, the audience of the Venice Film Festival 2025 gave a 23-minute ovation and "free Palestine" chants at the premiere of The Voice of Hind Rajab, the film about a five-year-old girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in February 2024, while trying to flee.
Including the real voice of the child’s call to Red Crescent, the film dramatizes her last moments hidden under the bodies of her dead family, while waiting rescue by the medics, who were eventually found killed.
“It was the very voice of Gaza asking for help and nobody could enter,” said the film’s director Tunisian Kaouther Ben Hania. Brad Pitt, Rooney Mara, Joaquin Phoenix, Alfonso Cuarón, Jonathan Glazer and James Wilson supported the film as executive producers, Phoenix and Mara being there in the Venice premiere.
Yorgos Lanthimos, wore a Palestinian flag pin at the press-conference of his seven minutes ovation Bugonia. A record thousands protested at the opening of the festival on the 27th of August. Over 1500 film-professionals sent to the Biennale a Venice4Palestine letter on the 23rd of August, calling the organisers to condemn the “genocide and ethnic cleansing in Gaza”. French-Moroccan producer Nabil Ayouch, Moroccan director Maryam Touzani, Italian actor Michele Riondino and Italian film-producer Stefano Sardo were among the artists who expressed solidarity to Palestine with a dress statement on the red carpet.
Venice Film Festival “have always been, throughout their history, places of open discussion and sensitivity to all the most pressing issues facing society and the world,” responded the festival’s organisers, while citing their lineup, including The Voice of Hind Rajab in 2025 and Israeli director’s Dani Rosenberg’s Of Dogs and Men shot about the Hamas attack of the 7th of October, in the lineup of 2024.
Artists, including world-famous high profile actors and cine-creators choose to take a political stance and bring Gaza to the spotlight of Venice Film Festival 2025.
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Image from the film The Voice of Hind Rajab by Kaouther Ben Hania - Production by Mime Films & Tanit Films (Nadim Cheikhrouha), James Wilson, Odessa Rae - Courtesy of the Venice Film Festival - La Biennale di Venezia.
