No other film at the festival received such an emphatic reception and a record-breaking 22 minutes of applause as "The Voice of Hind Rajab". Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania reconstructs the last hours in the life of 5-year-old Hind Rajab, who was killed in February 2024 while fleeing from the Israeli army in Gaza. The source material consists of the girl's telephone calls for help, which were recorded at the Red Crescent rescue centre in Ramallah. The film transforms the documentary material into a dramatic form, with the reactions and dialogues of the Palestinian rescuers being performed by actors.
From the outset, we know the tragic ending to the story and experience the agonising wait for permission to use an ambulance, which must be obtained from the Israeli army via the Red Cross in Jerusalem. For hours, the rescuers try to calm the girl, who is trapped in her uncle's car with his family as the sole survivor. When a rescue route is finally approved, the green light is given for the operation, and the ambulance is almost at its destination, contact with Hind Rajab and the paramedics is suddenly lost. The last, disturbing images of the film show the car in which the girl was sitting, riddled with 335 bullets, and the burnt-out ambulance with the charred bodies of the paramedics. It appears that Hind Rajab and her relatives, as well as the Palestinian paramedics, were deliberately murdered by the Israeli army.
The girl's fate exemplifies the powerlessness of aid workers in the Gaza war on the one hand and the brutality of the Israeli military on the other. Her death is representative of the deaths of tens of thousands of children in Gaza. "The Voice of Hind Rajab", on which Brad Pitt, Alfonso Cuarón, Joaquin Phoenix and Rooney Mara – the latter two were on the red carpet in Venice – served as executive producers, was acclaimed by international critics. Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania is internationally renowned and caused a stir two years ago in Cannes with her docu-fiction film "Olfa's Daughters". Only a few German critics had problems with the film. Wolfgang Höbel spoke in SPIEGEL of a "propagandistic" film, Katja Nicodemus (Deutschlandfunk) felt "emotionally held hostage" and said the film was ‘"irreverent" and did not belong in the competition because it put undue pressure on the jury.
Kathryn Bigelow's ‘A House of Dynamite’ is a completely different film of a political nature. The premise is somewhat absurd: a nuclear missile is fired at the United States and no one knows who could have launched it. The North Koreans, the Russians or the Chinese? The USA, a peaceful country and bastion of freedom, threatened by sinister enemies who will stop at nothing! Bigelow illuminates the situation from various perspectives, some of which overlap: the Situation Room in the White House, an air force base in Alaska, the office of the Secretary of Defence and, finally, the President, who must decide whether and how to strike back. Idris Elba plays him as an Obama lookalike who casually shoots a few hoops with some young people before the catastrophic news pulls him out of the game.
Since her Oscar-winning films ‘The Hurt Locker’ (2008) and ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ (2012), it is well known that Kathryn Bigelow has a complicit relationship with the military and the CIA. Her films invariably focus on obtaining crucial information in order to avert an imminent threat. ‘‘A House of Dynamite’ is fast-paced, with a tendency towards hysteria. In the hour of emergency, the protagonists first call their own family, so that they can get to safety in time before 10 million people in Chicago are incinerated. The dialogue is full of abbreviations, DEFCON 2 and NSCC are activated, GB1 and EGB fail to intercept the dangerous missile. In the end, the POTUS (President of the United States) must decide how to respond.
The military insider vocabulary serves to suggest the utmost level of realism. In a way, ‘A House of Dynamite’ is a counterpoint to ‘Dr. Strangelove.’.While Stanley Kubrick exaggerated the Pentagon's paranoid nuclear war fantasies in the early 1960s in order to ridicule them satirically, Kathryn Bigelow leaves nothing to laugh about. The visual appeal of ‘A House of Dynamite’ is undoubtedly due in large part to Barry Ackroyd's camera work and Kirk Baxter's editing. Kathryn Bigelow and her screenwriter Noah Oppenheim are solely responsible for the hysterical staging and absurd premise of a nuclear attack.
Olivier Assayas' political thriller ‘Le Mage du Kremlin’ (international title: The Wizard of the Kremlin) was eagerly awaited at the Lido. To cut a long story short, it failed to live up to expectations. It is based on Guiliano di Empoli's docu-fiction novel ‘Der Magier im Kreml’ (The Magician in the Kremlin), which describes Vladimir Putin's rise to power from the perspective of his advisor Vadim Baranov. The real-life model for Baranov is Vladislav Surkov, who played a key role in Putin's victory in the 2004 presidential elections. Surkov studied at the Moscow Institute of Culture, where he staged avant-garde theatre productions before becoming a successful businessman in the wild 1990s of Russian post-communism. Together with oligarch Boris Berezovsky (Will Keen), he prepared Boris Yeltsin's resignation and helped to establish Vladimir Putin, the unknown head of the domestic intelligence service FSB, as the strong man of Russian politics.
Surkov/Baranov first worked as a producer for TV shows before taking control of Russian state television with the help of Berezovsky. As Putin's close advisor and spin doctor, he becomes one of the most influential men in the Kremlin. A new Rasputin at the side of Tsar Putin, according to the description of Surkov/Baranov's character in the novel, which the film follows faithfully.
An American college professor (Jeffrey Wright) arrives in Russia and is invited by Baranov (Paul Dano) to his country house outside Moscow. There, Baranov tells him – and us, the audience – how Russia has developed since the collapse of the Soviet Union and how Putin has succeeded in establishing his authoritarian system. The description of political events is somewhat oversimplified; it is primarily the actions of powerful men behind the scenes who pull the strings and determine the country's politics. Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who is called Dimitri Federov (Tom Sturridge) in the film, rises from the leader of the Communist Youth to the richest oligarch until Putin has him arrested.
Jude Law, wearing a blonde wig, does a good job portraying Putin's judoka gang, but with his lips pressed together, he looks more like a caricature of the “new tsar”. The acting highlight of the film is Paul Dano, who, with his round face and soft voice, lends Baranov a kind of childlike charm . Needless to say, all the Russians speak English so as not to make it too difficult for the audience. Sometimes with more, sometimes with less of an Eastern accent, particularly pronounced in Alexander Saldostanow, the leader of the Night Wolves, a nationalist motorcycle gang that Baranov recruits as supporters and thugs. ‘The Wizard of the Kremlin’ suggests a causal chain of political manoeuvres that logically leads to an ever-intensifying confrontation with the West.