The investigative documentary NAZA, which caused a sensation at the Venice Film Festival but has been attacked by Israeli politicians including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, will soon reach U.S. theaters.
Filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and their team are pursuing a self-distribution model in the U.S. which will see the film open on September 30 at IFC in New York City. We’re told NAZA will expand to Los Angeles and other key markets on October 9, ahead of a nationwide rollout in the following weeks.
The film, built around interviews with 24 anonymous Israeli intelligence and military officers and soldiers, alleges the Israel Defense Forces set acceptable numbers of civilian deaths in Gaza in pursuit of Hamas targets. One of the whistleblowers cites an instance in which he says the IDF allowed for up to 500 Palestinian civilians to be killed in an attack on a Hamas target. Some of the sources allege Israel used AI to determine targets in heavily populated residential areas. The IDF has rejected that assertion as false and said the sources in the film did not have access to relevant intelligence and military information on which to base their assertions. It wrote, “The IDF categorically rejects these allegations.”
As Deadline reported, NAZA earned a record-breaking 25-minute standing ovation in Venice. Prime Minister Netanyahu has threatened to pass a law that could revoke the citizenship of Abraham, Szor or anyone who allegedly defames Israeli soldiers. Abraham and Szor, both Israeli Jews, are among the four directors of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land (along with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal), a film set in the occupied West Bank.
“We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli filmmakers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible,” Abraham and Szor said in a statement accompanying the announcement of the U.S. distribution plan. “While filming members of Israel’s military on rooftops at night in Tel Aviv over the past three years, we found ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents’ generation and throughout the 20th century: how does one group of people allow the total dehumanization of another? What do the inner workings of such a system look like?”
Their statement continued, “Many of the revelations in the film were published almost immediately as we learned of them, in the months following the October 7th attacks, by The Guardian (one of NAZA’s producers), in collaboration with reporting partners +972 Magazine and Local Call. The film lets us explore something deeper than we could in our investigative journalism alone: not only the words being said but also those that are not said, the silence. It is up to all of us to break that silence.”
The news release comments that NAZA was “shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv,” revealing “in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. NAZA is a military acronym euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that it expects will be killed in an airstrike.”
“Due to the urgency of the movie’s subject matter,” the release continues, “the filmmakers are moving ahead with an innovative distribution model, spearheaded by The Guardian and mk2, who have assembled a team of US and international partners and consultants to bring the film to audiences as quickly as possible. The Guardian and mk2 will announce further international distribution plans in the coming days.”
NAZA will hold its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on Sept. 26. Netanyahu’s attack on the film may reflect a concern for its potential impact on Israeli elections, which are set for October 27. Polls suggest the prime minister’s rightwing coalition could lose.
NAZA is produced by The Guardian and James Wilson (JW Films) and executive produced by Oscar- winning filmmaker Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest).
English (US) ·