Venice Film Festival Awards

Heading into Saturday night’s awards ceremony, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab was widely viewed as the movie to beat for this year’s Golden Lion. The powerful Gaza-set drama, which tells the story of a 6-year-old Palestinian girl’s desperate pleas for rescue after Israeli forces killed her relatives, received a thunderous 21-minute standing ovation at its world premiere, one of the longest in the Venice Film Festival‘s history.

But the film ended up going home with the festival’s Silver Lion for the Grand Jury prize, aka second place.

Hollywood heavyweights Brad Pitt, Joaquin Phoenix, Alfonso Cuarón boosted the movie’s profile ahead of the festival by joining its team as executive producers, while critics on the Lido hailed it as an “intensely involving and resounding” indictment of Israel’s genocidal campaigns against the Palestinian population.

Read more.