"NAZA" reveals the military operations behind "what all human rights organizations are saying is a genocide," the filmmakers say Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — who are two of the four co-directors of 2025’s Oscar-winning doc “No Other Land” — are at the Venice Film Festival with new hot-button documentary “NAZA.” Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film shows “in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” as its official synopsis puts it. It features revelatory interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers — all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity — who were involved in the surveillance or remote killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Their appearance and voices were digitally altered to disguise their identities.
The only documentary feature in this year’s Venice’s competition lineup, “NAZA” is produced by British newspaper The Guardian and James Wilson (JW Films) and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer. Wilson and Glazer are the Oscar-winning team behind the film “The Zone of Interest.” Abraham and Szor sat down with Variety in Venice and spoke about how they went about providing an inside look at the Israeli military “as it carried out what all human rights organizations are saying is a genocide,” they say. Abraham: Rachel and I, we’ve always felt a responsibility to document what our country is doing to Palestinians.
And our focus, in “No Other Land” as well, has been on crimes that we view as systemic crimes. So, not some soldier making a mistake or some sporadic incident. But things that are really fundamental parts of the way the Israeli government, and the army, operate.
Obviously, “No Other Land” was about the systemic removal of Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. With this film, after Oct. 7 everyone was seeing the systemic bombing of Palestinians in Gaza, such as the killing of classrooms full of children, every day for two years. And the truth of that was, I think, apparent from the start.
Because Palestinians were documenting their own destruction. As Israelis, we found ourselves wanting to use the kind of position that we have, the access that we have to our own society, to people that went into the military, to look at that system as it carried out what all human rights organizations are saying is a genocide. To look at it from the inside.
Abraham: It was a challenge. I work as an investigative journalist, so for many years I’ve been searching for people from within the Israeli system. This piece is not the first time [revelations of this type are made].
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