Tunis, July 22 — Twice Oscar-nominated Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania’s next film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, has been nominated for the Golden Lion of the Venice Film Festival “La Mostra di Venezia,” scheduled for August 27-September 6, 2025.
The film dramatises the final hours of six-year-old Palestinian child Hind Rajab, who was killed by Zionist fire in January 2024 after being stranded in a car with her dead relatives in Gaza.
Her recorded cries for help, made during a 70-minute call with emergency responders, were widely circulated online and became a haunting symbol of the war’s toll on civilians.
Ben Hania’s will compete against several high-profile films, including Frankenstein by Guillermo Del Toro, No Other Choice by Park Chan-wook, and A House of Dynamite by Kathryn Bigelow.
Ben Hania, whose last film Four Daughters was nominated for Best Documentary at the 2024 Academy Awards, says she was compelled to change course entirely after hearing Hind’s voice for the first time.
“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. That pain, that failure, belongs to all of us,” Ben Hania indicated.
“This story is not just about Gaza. It speaks to a universal grief,” she said. “Cinema can preserve a memory. Cinema can resist amnesia. May Hind Rajab’s voice be heard.”
English: Ben Dhaou Nejiba
