Hind's voice shocks the Venice Film Festival with her cry against the genocide in Gaza: "How have we allowed a child to beg for her life?" (*****)

The question is always the same: how to show the atrocious without turning it into a spectacle, without falling into the web-slinging ritual of horror. The voice of Hind, by Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, recounts an episode, one of the most gruesome (and there are already some), of the constantly televised and ever-present genocide in Gaza. On January 29, 2024, the six-year-old girl in the title was murdered along with her two uncles and four cousins ​​by the Israeli army in the Gaza neighborhood of Tel al-Hawa. The ambulance and its two passengers that came to her aid were also massacred. The car in which the Rajab family was traveling was shot 355 times. The film, shot entirely at the Red Crescent emergency center, reveals neither rubble nor destruction, nor blood nor menacing soldiers. You simply see—because you see, not just hear—a voice, Hind Rajab's sustained cry for help and everyone's silent desperation. Nothing more.

What remains is a monument received standing ovation in the press room—not exactly enthusiastic, though that too, but more of rage—that lasted for more than a minute. As soon as the film's crew entered the ritual press conference, actress Saja Kilani took the microphone. "Enough of the killing, famine, dehumanization, destruction, and continued occupation," she said. Time will pass, and the 2025 Venice Film Festival will forever be The Voice of Hind. It's impossible to imagine a more obvious Golden Lion.

The film can be understood as a consequence, rather than a continuation, of the cinema Kaouther Ben Hania has developed to date. The director of The Man Who Sold His Skin and Four Daughters refuses to be swept away by the urgency of the narrative and insists on interweaving reality and fiction in a virtuoso play of mirrors between the true and the irrevocable; between emotion and the most elemental truth. The film, like so many others, warns that it is inspired by real events. But this time it is not the usual warning that is more a matter of distrust of fiction than of faith in reality.

The facts are there, intact; the voices heard are those recorded at the Red Crescent headquarters on the day everything happened. The actors replace their characters, but they do so almost tiptoeing, making it clear at all times that they are what they are: interpreters of lives that are not their own. In fact, at times, a cell phone screen, which displays images of the real protagonists superimposed over the actors, brings the narrator's (i.e., the director's) gaze into the frame. It sounds complicated, perhaps labyrinthine, but, in truth, it is merely transparent.

Something similar happened in the Oscar-nominated documentary Four Daughters . It told the story of Olfa Hamrouni, the woman who rose to fame in a very painful way when, in 2016, she lashed out at her government in Tunisia for not preventing two of her four daughters from joining the Islamic State. The director asked two actresses (Nour Karoui and Ichraq Matar) to play the missing women. They had them play the roles of the other sisters, who at that time were playing the roles of sisters in reality and fiction at the same time. The same thing happened with the mother. She played herself, but, in certain particularly difficult moments, actress Hen Sabry borrowed her life. And all this while filming the moment in which the film itself is being shot.

Now the device, as film schools say, is simpler, but just as direct and infinitely more brutal. It's not just the effect of the proximity of the barbarity televised daily from Palestine, but also the devastating power of what is imagined from the audience. It's not what is seen that matters, but what is there. And what is there before a gaze that only listens is an exercise in cinema that is moving to the point of pain, an exercise in cinema that runs entirely from the back, where the most fearsome monsters, the most obscene, dwell. Tremendous. Unbearable.

The same actress who responded eagerly to the culpable applause of the press made it clear: "Hind's story is about a crying little girl. And the real question is: how have we allowed a little girl to beg for her life? No one can live in peace while even a single child is forced to beg for their survival." At her side, the director herself, more didactic, preferred to express her thanks: "It was a strong desire and a feeling of anger and helplessness that gave rise to this film. But I was surrounded by wonderful people, with the full support of Hind's mother and family and all the Red Cross workers, who are the true heroes of this story."

From the start, the project struggled to get off the ground with virtually no support whatsoever. That was the case until last week, when figures like Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Rooney Mara, Alfonso Cuarón, and Jonathan Glazer agreed to serve as executive producers. Phoenix, going one step further, was present at the press conference.

The result is a film that has already left its mark on Venice, that will define the year, and that is impossible to watch without a pang of shame and embarrassment; a film that tells more than what it tells; a film that hurts and hurts; a film that, in truth, is projected on an essentially shared territory. And hence, without a doubt, everyone's fault. Monumental.