Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — who are two of the four co-directors of 2025’s Oscar-winning doc “No Other Land” — are at the Venice Film Festival with new hot-button documentary “NAZA.”
Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film shows “in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” as its official synopsis puts it. It features revelatory interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers — all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity — who were involved in the surveillance or remote killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Their appearance and voices were digitally altered to disguise their identities.
“NAZA” a term that appears throughout the documentary, is an acronym for collateral damage used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians it expects will be killed in an airstrike.
The only documentary feature in this year’s Venice’s competition lineup, “NAZA” is produced by British newspaper The Guardian and James Wilson (JW Films) and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer. Wilson and Glazer are the Oscar-winning team behind the film “The Zone of Interest.”
Abraham and Szor sat down with Variety in Venice and spoke about how they went about providing an inside look at the Israeli military “as it carried out what all human rights organizations are saying is a genocide,” they say.
