Israel‘s Culture Minister has said he will work to revoke the citizenship of Oscar-winning filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor over their new documentary, NAZA.
Writing on X, Zohar described the film as “vile,” saying it “constitutes treason.”
The documentary, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, 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.
“This is exactly the reason I led the important reform in cinema so that Israeli citizens will no longer have to pay out of their own pockets for the harm to IDF soldiers and the State of Israel,” Zohar wrote, referring to his recent reforms of government funding for the Israeli film industry.
NAZA, like the documentary No Other Land, directed by Zohar and Abraham together with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, did not receive any Israeli public funding. NAZA was produced in part with support from British newspaper The Guardian.
