NAZA documentary receives 25-minute ovation in Venice
The documentary NAZA by Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor received a 25-minute ovation at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival. As Dawn reports, viewers applauded the film’s creators continuously after the screening. The outlet notes that this may be a new festival record: last year, a film about Gaza received a 23-minute ovation.
Testimony from military personnel and intelligence officers
The 80-minute film was the result of an investigation lasting nearly three years. For the project, Abraham and Szor spoke with 24 Israeli military personnel or intelligence officers who agreed to be interviewed on condition that their identities were not disclosed. Their faces and voices were digitally altered in the film.
The filmmakers’ interlocutors describe an artificial intelligence-based system called Lavender which, they say, was used to designate people as targets for killing. One participant in the film, who said he had worked with the system, stated: “The system’s parameters are so complex that they are difficult to understand.” Others described the process as working in a “factory” and compared it to a video game because of the remote nature of decision-making.
According to the outlet, the title NAZA derives from a euphemism used by Israeli intelligence to refer to the expected number of civilian casualties from an airstrike. The film also discusses mass surveillance of Gaza’s telecommunications network, whose data the system allegedly used to analyze people’s calls, movements and contacts.
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Screening in the competition program
NAZA is the only documentary in the competition program of this year’s Venice Film Festival. In 2025, Abraham and Szor, together with Palestinians Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, won an Oscar for No Other Land, a film about violence by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank.
The new film was produced by British producer Jim Wilson; Jonathan Glazer and the British newspaper The Guardian also contributed to its creation. Israel denies deliberately striking Gaza’s civilian population and accuses Hamas of hiding among the enclave’s population.
According to Gaza’s Hamas-controlled Health Ministry, around 73,500 Palestinians have been killed and another 174,500 injured as a result of Israeli bombardments since October 2023. The article notes that the UN considers these figures reliable.
