“The Voice of Hind Rajab” belongs to a very limited category: those films that know is to dominate a review, become the flag, as well as an era, a historical moment, in a so powerful, open, clear way, to become a real political act, a stance, crossing the mere artistic border. Kouther Ben Hania gives us his best film, a masterpiece that becomes the Venice Manifesto 2025.

The Voice of Hind Rajab – The plot

“The Voice of Hind Rajab” embraces a more than documentary component from the beginning, we are on the border between the two genres, given that the original audio are used, in some situations the real images and videos to talk about what happens that January 29 of 2024 in Gaza. A team of volunteers in a Red Luna station, 83 km from the city theater of furious fights, receives a desperate telephone call: a six -year -old girl, Hind Rajab, is trapped in a car, riddled with bullets, buried almost under the corpses of her family, asks for help. For all those present, a Calvary will begin long hours, given the need to have green light from the same Israeli army who could kill Hind and how nothing ambulances sent to help her. The only thread that connects Hind to its rescuers, imprisoned by bureaucracy, indifference, with a wall full of colleagues slaughtered by the Israelis on duty, is that telephone line, those voices that try to tell her that everything will be fine. A race against time begins, the war, where there is no certainty and despair takes over everyone.

Kouther Ben Hania we don’t discover it today as a director. In recent years, the Tunisian filmmaker has conquered us with great films such as “Beauty and the Beast”, “The man who sold his skin”, “four daughters”, who made it one of the most important filmmakers in the world. But “The Voice of Hind Rajab” is on a level of its own, it is a film that can claim three elements of absolute level: a perfect direction, an incredible cast and a diegetic conception which, although not new, is effective in order to say the least shocking. Ben Hania closes us inside those rooms, the outside world only arrives on the phone, creating a claustrophobic universe with few precedents by effectiveness. All we have to know we understand it from the faces, the eyes, the tears that gradually dig an increasingly deep furrow into the viewer, forcing him to climb a pyramid of pain, impotence, anger and frustration. “The Voice of Hind Rajab” uses the real audio files of that day, recreates with meticulous precision dialogues, phone calls, an illogical and sadistic Kafkian hell that makes that voice desperate more and more distant, increasingly distant.

A film that revolutionizes the concept of civil cinema

The phone as the protagonist of the story is certainly not a novelty, cinema is full of examples in which this found has given great results. Ben Hania, however, does not invent anything, this is what happened to Hind, this is what his rescuers had to face, feel, try, with the heartbreaking thought of a six -year -old children crushed by the bodies of uncles and cousins ​​in a car, aware of the death that looms on her. The Israeli soldiers one imagines them, even if he does not see them, as we have known them in recent months: sadistic, cold predators, calculators, for whom the only good Palestinian is the dead one. The audio recorded in those hours are difficult to bear. Fear dominates Hind, every sentence of his in the end always has the same invocation: come and get me. There is a universal feeling of helplessness that goes down to you from the big screen, to the bones, you dig a hole that then ribbles of anger, of the need to express it. “The Voice of Hind Rajab” in this is a totally new film, because this has happened, this happens, and we cannot do anything about it.

If Kathryn Bigelow with “A House of Dynamite” creates a metanarration on the new geopolitical chaos, Ben Hania instead reports everything within the boundaries of the single episode, however universal by message, emotion, for what it represents for anyone who has even just a little bit of empathy. To look to the past, to what the cinema has created to talk about this hell that does not stop self -diet, “Valzer with Bashir”, “Lebanon”, “Il Giardino dei Limoni”, “No Other Land” can be remembered, but “The Voice of Hind Rajab” is superior for the ability to be universal in the most instinctive sense, uncontrollable of what triggers you inside. Difficult to decide who between Motaz Malhees, Clara Khoury, Amer Hlehel and Saja Kilani is better, but this is not even what matters, it counts how together they managed to completely reset the impression of being faced with something fictitious. There have been great films in this biennial that re -launched Venice, but not rewarding this desperate appeal to memory, justice, humanity with the golden lion, would be inconceivable.

Rating: 10