NAZA beats Avengers Endgame: Encore to top Italian box office — SkimNews
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- NAZA opened at No. 1 on the Italian box office with €451,872 on Monday rising to roughly €1.1m by end of Tuesday, beating Avengers Endgame: Encore which made €356,000 over the same period
- I Wonder Pictures founder Andrea Romeo confirmed the film will keep screening as long as theaters want it, with over 150 Italian cinemas already extending their programming beyond the initial three-day booking
- Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Oscar-winning directors, built the 80-minute film around testimony from 24 anonymized Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers describing AI-powered systems used to select bombing targets
- The film's title refers to an acronym Israeli intelligence used euphemistically to indicate the number of civilians expected to die in an airstrike, and it won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival after a record 25-minute ovation
- NAZA opens in New York on Wednesday ahead of a wider U.S. release on October 9, and will roll out to more than 50 territories before becoming freely available on theguardian.com in mid-November
- At the North American premiere, Abraham warned the crimes depicted are "ongoing… because of what your country is supporting and funding," while both filmmakers disclosed escalating Israeli threats to strip them of citizenship
Why it matters: A documentary on Israeli military operations in Gaza outperformed a Marvel rerelease in its opening days, with Italian audiences extending runs at 150+ cinemas — an indicator that audience appetite for unfiltered wartime testimony extends beyond activist circles, and a commercial milestone that complicates the film's critics' attempts to dismiss it as activist content.
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