The Venice Film Festival kicked off on Wednesday with the return of Hollywood royalty to Italy's swanky movie showcase, where 21 films from around the globe will vie for the prestigious Golden Lion award.

Julia Roberts and George Clooney are among the big names expected at the 82nd edition of the world's longest-running festival. But this year, the red carpet shares space with stories of war, grief, and protest, as Gaza takes a prominent place on and off screen.

‘The Voice of Hind Rajab’

Alongside the stars and glitzy atmosphere are films that promise to provoke debate, such as the Gaza film "The Voice of Hind Rajab" from two-time Oscar nominee Kaouther Ben Hania.

The film tells the real-life story of Hind Rajab, a 6-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by Israeli forces along with her family in Gaza in 2024, even as she pleaded for help over the phone while trapped in a car under Israeli fire. The Israeli soldiers riddled the car with 335 bullets.

Central to the movie is the actual audio recording of Hind’s desperate call, according to the director Kaouther Ben Hania’s statement on the Venice Film Festival’s official website.

“There was something electric in the energy around this project, so immediate, so alive,” she writes, recalling how the project began not in a studio, but in an airport layover during her Oscar campaign for Les filles d’Olfa, a film she had been writing for ten years.

The making of the film

After hearing Hind’s voice online, Ben Hania had a “physical reaction, like the ground shifted under me,” and immediately reached out to the Red Crescent for the full recording.

“After listening to it, I knew, without a doubt, that I had to drop everything else. I had to make this film.”

The director deliberately chose to keep the violence off-screen.

“Because violent images are everywhere... what I wanted was to focus on the invisible: the waiting, the fear, the unbearable sound of silence when help doesn’t come.”

Ben Hania added: “Sometimes, what you don’t see is more devastating than what you do.”

She spent time speaking with Hind’s mother and those who were on the other end of that call. What emerged was a tightly focused, single-location story woven from real testimonies.

“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.”

As Ben Hania puts it, the film is not just about Gaza, but speaks to “universal” grief. “Cinema can preserve a memory. Cinema can resist amnesia,” she concludes in her statement.

Her film premieres amidst growing calls from Italian filmmakers for the festival not to remain silent on Israel’s war on Gaza.

Protesters gather at Venice Lido

Before the start of the festival, a group of Italian film professionals called on organisers not to remain silent on the Gaza war, and a protest on the Lido is scheduled for Saturday.

The festival's artistic director, Alberto Barbera, said he was seeing "a return to reality" from filmmakers.

Directors today are "reflecting on the major problems that afflict us daily on a global level, from wars to the return of nuclear anxiety, obviously the occupation of Gaza and Palestine, but also the many dictatorships resurging throughout the world", Barbera said, speaking from the red carpet.

"The film festival is obviously not closed in a bubble... it's open to considering everything happening around us."