Gaza documentary NAZA to compete for Venice Golden Lion
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- NAZA, a Guardian-produced documentary about Israel's bombing campaign in Gaza, will compete for Venice's Golden Lion as the only documentary in this year's competition
- Abraham and Szor direct the film, which was shot at night on Tel Aviv rooftops and "reveals in detail the systems behind Israel's calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza," per the filmmakers
- The title NAZA is an Israeli military acronym used euphemistically by intelligence to indicate the expected number of civilians killed in an airstrike, per the Guardian
- The film is produced by Jim Wilson and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, the team behind The Zone of Interest
- Abraham and Szor were two of four directors of No Other Land, which won the Oscar for best documentary in 2025 alongside Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal
- The documentary builds on original investigative reporting from 2023-2025 by +972, Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, and the Guardian
- After No Other Land's Oscar win, co-director Hamdan Ballal was attacked by Israeli settlers and briefly arrested; the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences later apologized for failing to name him or the film in a statement of support
Why it matters: The film's title alone — an Israeli military term for expected civilian deaths in a single airstrike — puts the military's own euphemistic calculus directly on a festival stage, giving the project's previous Oscar-winning directors a global platform to make Israeli targeting procedures the subject of competitive documentary cinema.
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