NAZA, which won a Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival Saturday night, is already one of the most shocking and controversial documentaries of the year. It may also prove to be one of the most indispensable.
The exposé, from Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, features testimony from 24 Israeli military officers outlining the systems and protocols they allege Israel uses to target and kill civilians in Gaza. The film’s title, NAZA, comes from an acronym the Israeli military uses as a shorthand for civilian casualties.
Abraham and Szor, part of the director collective behind the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, which documented the destruction of a village in the occupied West Bank by Israeli soldiers and settlers, shot NAZA clandestinely over three years, doing the interviews under the cover of night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv. The duo used VFX to alter the voices and faces of the officers.
Their allegations and revelations are harrowing. One describes hacking into the phone of a 12-year-old girl to identify when her father, a target, comes home, and ordering the bombing that kills the whole family. Another describes how snipers gun down Palestinian civilians as they desperately scramble to reach a food distribution site.
