NAZA Gaza doc filmmakers defend film at NYC premiere amid threats — SkimNews
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- Filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor defended their Guardian-produced documentary NAZA at its North American premiere at Lincoln Center on Saturday, facing threats from Israeli officials to revoke their citizenship over the film's revelations.
- The 80-minute film features testimony from 24 anonymized Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers describing AI-powered systems used to select and kill Palestinian civilians, with "NAZA" itself being an acronym Israeli intelligence uses to indicate expected civilian deaths per airstrike.
- Prime Minister Netanyahu likened the film to "launching dozens of ballistic missiles" at Israel and reiterated plans to advance legislation stripping Abraham and Szor—two of the four Oscar-winning No Other Land filmmakers—of their citizenship, the day after defending the Gaza war at the UN General Assembly as "the opposite of genocide."
- Israeli officials escalated their response alongside Netanyahu: culture minister Miki Zohar accused the pair of "treason," IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir promised to use "every tool at our disposal" against the film, and right-wing activists surrounded Szor's parents' home with one calling for "the death penalty for traitors."
- The documentary received a festival-record 25-minute standing ovation at Venice and won the special jury prize, drawing public support from over 1,500 Israeli film professionals, 43 Israeli human rights organizations, and directors of major international festivals.
- The filmmakers stressed the US premiere's weight given America's $3.8 billion annual military assistance to Israel—Abraham telling the crowd, "these soldiers are talking about what has been done with the taxpayer money of the people sitting here"—with the film set for theatrical release in 55 countries next month and a free global digital release on the Guardian's website in November.
Why it matters: NAZA transforms classified Israeli military testimony about Gaza targeting systems into a globally accessible artifact, putting direct material pressure on the US–Israel $3.8 billion military relationship while Netanyahu simultaneously pushes citizenship-stripping legislation against the filmmakers and defends the war at the UN, collapsing diplomacy, propaganda, and domestic repression into a single weekend.
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