Israeli Gaza AI film NAZA earns 25-min Venice ovation — SkimNews
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- NAZA, an 80-minute Israeli documentary on AI-assisted targeting of Palestinians in Gaza, received a 25-minute standing ovation at its Venice Film Festival premiere and is the only documentary in competition at this year's festival
- Directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, Oscar winners in 2025 for "No Other Land," spent nearly three years collecting testimony from Israeli military and intelligence sources whose faces and voices were digitally altered and who were filmed at night on Tel Aviv rooftops
- Interviewees describe the "Lavender" AI system, which drew on Gaza's monitored telecommunications — phone calls, movements, interactions — to identify assassination targets at mass scale, with one source calling the process "like a video game" and "insanely fun"
- The film's title is a Hebrew intelligence term for expected civilian deaths in a strike; sources admitted they witnessed homes they "incriminated" were filled with families, and Abraham called the civilian killings "premeditated, calculated, and intentional"
- Co-produced by The Guardian with the UK's Jim Wilson and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer — the team behind 2024 Oscar winner The Zone of Interest — NAZA follows last year's Venice entry "The Voice of Hind Rajab," which received a 23-minute ovation
Why it matters: Abraham explicitly aimed the film at Western governments, urging them to drop backing for Israel and apply sanctions — and unlike outside reporting, the testimony comes from Israeli intelligence insiders themselves. With foreign journalists barred from Gaza, NAZA becomes one of the few firsthand-sourced records of how AI-assisted targeting worked inside the military chain, and its 25-minute Venice reception amplifies the pressure campaign Abraham and Szor are pursuing.
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