<\/p>\n
A harrowing docudrama about Israel\u2019s killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl during its ongoing war on Gaza has won the Silver Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival.<\/p>\n
The Voice of Hind Rajab<\/span>, by French-Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, came in second on Saturday to the movie Father Mother Sister Brother by United States indie director Jim Jarmusch.<\/p>\n The film tells the true story of Hind Rajab, who was killed by Israeli forces last year, as she and her family tried to evacuate Gaza City.<\/p>\n It uses real audio from Rajab\u2019s hours-long call to the Palestine Red Crescent Society, in which rescuers tried to reassure her as she lay trapped in a bullet-ridden car with the bodies of her aunt, uncle and three cousins, who had all been killed by Israeli fire.<\/p>\n The girl was then also killed, as were the two ambulance workers who went to the scene to try and rescue her.<\/p>\n The film was the most talked-about movie on the Venice Lido and tipped by many as the likely winner after a 23-minute standing ovation<\/span> at its premiere on Wednesday.<\/p>\n Ben Hania, accepting her award, said Rajab\u2019s story was not just that of the young girl, but tragically that of \u201can entire people enduring genocide\u201d.<\/p>\n \u201cCinema cannot bring Hind back, nor can it erase the atrocity committed against her. Nothing can ever restore what was taken, but cinema can preserve her voice, make it resonate across borders,\u201d the director said.<\/p>\n \u201cHer voice will continue to echo until accountability is real, until justice is served.\u201d<\/p>\n Israel\u2019s war on Gaza, which has killed more than 64,000 Palestinians, including more than 18,000 children,<\/span> cast a long shadow over this year\u2019s festival.<\/p>\n Jarmusch, who won the coveted Golden Lion, signalled his opposition to Israel\u2019s continued siege and bombardment of Gaza by wearing a badge saying \u201cEnough\u201d at the award ceremony.<\/p>\n Earlier in the weekend, when he had unveiled Father Mother Sister Brother, the 72-year-old director acknowledged that he was concerned that one of his main distributors had taken money from a company with ties to the Israeli military.<\/p>\n Jarmusch\u2019s winning film stars Cate Blanchett, Adam Driver and Tom Waits, and is a three-part meditation on the uneasy ties between parents and their adult children.<\/p>\n He called Saturday\u2019s win an \u201cunexpected honour\u201d and thanked the grand jury for \u201cappreciating our quiet film\u201d.<\/p>\n In other categories, Italy\u2019s Toni Servillo was named best actor for his wry portrayal of a weary president nearing the end of his mandate, in La Grazia, while China\u2019s Xin Zhilei won best actress for her role in The Sun Rises On Us All, a drama that delves into questions of sacrifice, guilt and unresolved feelings between estranged lovers who share a dark secret.<\/p>\n The best director nod went to Benny Safdie for The Smashing Machine, which starred Dwayne \u201cThe Rock\u201d Johnson in the role of the real-life mixed martial arts pioneer Mark Kerr.<\/p>\n The special jury award went to Italy\u2019s Gianfranco Rosi for his black-and-white documentary Below the Clouds, about life in the chaotic southern city of Naples, marked by repeated earthquakes and the threat of volcanic eruptions.<\/p>\n Servillo, who won best actor, was one of several award-winners to speak about Gaza from the stage, expressing \u201cadmiration\u201d for activists on a flotilla of boats attempting to break Israel\u2019s siege of Gaza.<\/p>\n They \u201chave decided to set sail with courage to reach Palestine and to bring a sign of humanity to a land where human dignity is daily and cruelly demeaned\u201d, Servillo said.<\/p>\n Annapurna Roy, who won the best director prize in the Horizons sidebar, a discovery section led by French filmmaker Julia Ducournau, also devoted part of her remarks to the conflict in Gaza.<\/p>\n Roy, who is Indian, won the award for her debut feature, Songs of Forgotton Trees, about two migrant women in Mumbai.<\/p>\n \u201cEvery child deserves peace, freedom, liberation, and Palestine is no exception,\u201d Roy said. \u201cI stand beside Palestine. I might upset my country, but it doesn\u2019t matter to me any more.\u201d<\/p>\n Armani Beauty\u2019s audience award winning filmmaker Maryam Touzani (Calle M\u00e1laga) also spotlighted the conflict in Gaza.<\/p>\n \u201cHow many mothers have been made childless?\u201d she said. \u201cHow many more until this horror is brought to an end? We refuse to lose our humanity.\u201d<\/p>\n The Venice festival marks the start of the awards season, and regularly throws up big favourites for the Oscars, with films premiering there over the past four years collecting more than 90 Oscar nominations and winning almost 20.<\/p>\n Among the movies that left Venice empty-handed were a trio of Netflix pictures, Kathryn Bigelow\u2019s nuclear thriller A House of Dynamite, Guillermo del Toro\u2019s re-telling of Frankenstein, and Noah Baumbach\u2019s comedy-drama Jay Kelly.<\/p>\n No Other Choice by South Korea\u2019s Park Chan-wook also failed to secure an award, despite strong reviews; likewise, Bugonia by Yorgos Lanthimos, which starred Emma Stone.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A harrowing docudrama about Israel\u2019s killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl during its ongoing war on Gaza has won the Silver Lion prize at the Venice Film Festival. The Voice of Hind Rajab, by French-Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania, came in second on Saturday to the movie Father Mother Sister Brother by United States indie […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2003332,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[357997,308807,363264,308806,355721,346395,364562,356171,351277,333428,363813,364728],"class_list":["post-2003331","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-father-mother-sister-brother","tag-gaza","tag-hind-rajab","tag-israel","tag-kaouther-ben-hania","tag-palestine","tag-palestine-red-crescent-society","tag-toni-servillo","tag-venice","tag-venice-film-festival","tag-venice-lido","tag-war-on-gaza"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Gaza-war-film-The-Voice-of-Hind-Rajab-wins-2nd.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003331","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2003331"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2003331\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2003332"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2003331"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2003331"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2003331"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}