Venice Film Festival has completed its Competition lineup with Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s NAZA, a documentary about the Gaza war.
NAZA was filmed at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv. The film’s synopsis says it “reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”
According to The Guardian, which produces the film, NAZA is a military acronym used euphemistically by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians it expects will be killed in an air strike.
The film is also produced by James Wilson of the UK’s JW Films, and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer.
Wilson was a producer and Glazer an executive producer on Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice Of Hind Rajab, a dramatisation of the efforts to rescue a five-year-old Palestinian girl under fire from Israeli forces, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Venice last year.
NAZA brings the Competition programme for the Venice Film Festival to 21 films, with Szor only the second female director in the section alongside Woman Unknown director May el-Toukhy.
Abraham and Szor were two of the four directors of the documentary No Other Land, about the destruction of the Masafer Yatta hamlets in the West Bank by Israeli soldiers. The film won the audience award in Panorama at the Berlinale in 2024, before going on to win the Oscar for best documentary feature film the following year.
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