A gut-wrenching new film about a five-year-old girl allegedly killed by Israeli forces in Gaza last year was given a 23-minute standing ovation after its premiere at the star-studded Venice Film Festival on Wednesday.

“The Voice of Hind Rajab,” a docu-drama about real events from January 2024, left much of the audience and many journalists sobbing as it screened for the first time.

Franco-Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania and her cast, all dressed in black, were also in tears as they soaked in applause, cheers and shouts of “Free Palestine! at the 1,032-seat main festival cinema.

“We see that the narrative all around world is that those dying in Gaza are collateral damage, in the media,” Ben Hania told journalists ahead of the premiere.

“And I think this is so dehumanizing, and that’s why cinema, art and every kind of expression is very important to give those people a voice and face.”

Her film tells the story of Hind Rajab Hamada who was fleeing Gaza City with six relatives last year when their car came under fire.

The sole survivor, her desperate calls with the Red Crescent rescue service — which were recorded and released — brief caused international outrage.

Rajab’s death has been blamed on the Israel Defense Forces, which weeks later said that an initial probe showed there were no troops in the area at the time.

“The Voice of Hind Rajab” has plenty of famous names attached as executive producers — from actors Joaquin Phoenix, who attended the premiere, and Brad Pitt to Oscar-winning directors Jonathan Glazer (“The Zone of Interest”) and Mexico’s Alfonso Cuaron (“Roma”).

“I’m very happy, and I never in my life thought that can be possible,” Ben Hania said of her A-list backers.

“The Voice of Hind Rajab” makes chilling use of the real phone recordings of Hind Rajab, but tells the story through a dramatised Red Crescent team which is trying to coordinate her rescue.

“It is dramatization, but very close to what they experienced,” Ben Hania added.

Hind Rajab was eventually found dead along with two ambulance staff who went to rescue her.

“Please come to me, please come. I’m scared,” she can be heard sobbing repeatedly in the film while bullets fly in the background.

She is described as six years old, but a death certificate viewed by AFP in Gaza showed her age as five.

Deadline magazine said the film “could be the lightning rod that supporters of the Gazan cause are waiting for,” while Vogue tipped it for Venice’s top prize on Saturday.

A critic in Variety magazine said the “shattering” audio footage “carries a brutal emotional wallop” but the mix of drama and documentary footage was “questionable.”

The Gaza conflict has been a major talking point at the 2025 Venice Film Festival, where thousands of pro-Palestinian, anti-Israel protesters marched to the entrance of the event on Saturday.

An open letter calling on festival organizers to denounce the Israeli government has been signed by around 2,000 cinema insiders, according to the organizers.

Hind Rajab’s mother, Wissam Hamada, said she hoped the film would help end the war.

“The whole world has left us to die, to go hungry, to live in fear and to be forcibly displaced without doing anything,” Hamada told AFP by phone from Gaza City where she lives with her five-year-old son.

The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says more than 63,000 people in the Strip have been killed or are presumed dead in the fighting so far, though the toll cannot be verified and does not differentiate between civilians and fighters. Israel says it has killed over 22,000 combatants in battle as of August and another 1,600 terrorists inside Israel during the October 7 onslaught.

Israel has said it seeks to minimize civilian fatalities and stresses that Hamas uses Gaza’s civilians as human shields, fighting from civilian areas including homes, hospitals, schools, and mosques.

Contacted by AFP, the Israeli military said the circumstances of Hind Rajab’s death were “still being reviewed,” without giving further details.

It has never announced a formal investigation into the case.

The war in Gaza has regularly caused tension in the cinema world since it began with the Palestinian terror group’s October 7, 2023, onslaught against Israel, in which some 1,200 people were killed and 251 hostages abducted.

Hundreds of actors and directors signed an open letter during the Cannes film festival in May saying they were “ashamed” of their industry’s “passivity” about the war.

Cannes began under the shadow of the killing of Palestinian photojournalist Fatima Hassouna, the subject of the documentary which was picked for a sidebar section of the festival.

A day after Hassouna was told the film had been selected, an Israeli airstrike on her home in northern Gaza killed her and 10 relatives. According to the IDF, the strike targeted a Hamas operative involved in attacks on soldiers and civilians.

Amid the intensive criticism of Israel in Venice, US director Julian Schnabel hit out at calls to boycott Scottish actor Gerard Butler who has been targeted by activists for his alleged previous support for the Israeli military.

Butler gives a gripping performance as a hit man in Schnabel’s latest film — “In The Hand of Dante” — which premiered at the film festival on Wednesday.

“It’s unfortunate,” Schnabel told AFP of the boycott calls by activist group Venice4Palestine which has cited Butler’s appearance at a fund-raising event for the Israeli military in 2018.

“It’s not even true,” the artist and director of Oscar-nominated “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” added.

“He went to a cocktail party with somebody and happened to have his picture taken. He didn’t raise that dough for them.”

Butler (“How To Train Your Dragon,” “300”) was one of several stars to attend a 2018 Hollywood gala organized by the Friends of the Israel Defense Forces (FIDF), which raised a record $60 million, according to a Variety report at the time.

Other attendees included actor Ashton Kutcher and musician and Louis Vuitton menswear head Pharrell Williams, who provided entertainment.

Venice4Palestine, a collective of independent Italian filmmakers, had called on organizers of the Venice festival to disinvite Butler as well as Israeli actor Gal Gadot, who also stars in “In The Hand of Dante.”

Schnabel, who is Jewish and a critic of the Gaza war, told AFP that Butler had given the “performance of his life” in his movie about the theft of the original manuscript of Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy,”

The Venice Film Festival has ruled out disinviting actors — Butler and Gadot were not expected this year in any case — but Venice4Palestine co-founder and director Fabiomassimo Lozzi has defended the boycott call.

“I believe that it’s justified in the same way I believed about 40 years ago that it was justified boycotting artists who performed in South Africa at the height of the apartheid system,” he told AFP.

Israeli TV writer Hagai Levi (“Scenes From a Marriage”), another outspoken critic of the Gaza war, told AFP in Venice that any boycotts had to be targeted.

“Ninety percent of the artistic community in Israel” was against the war, he said.

“Boycotting them is actually weakening the only people who can make a change, or those who are at least fighting,” he told AFP on Tuesday.