French sales company MK2 Films has boarded “NAZA,” the new hot-button documentary from “No Other Land” directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor that was added on Monday to the Venice Film Festival competition lineup.
The doc, which was shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, shows “in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” according to its official synopsis.
“NAZA,” the film’s title, is a term that appears throughout the documentary. “It is a military acronym euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that it expects will be killed in an airstrike,” according to a MK2 Films statement.
The film — which is the only documentary feature in this year’s Venice’s competition lineup — 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 are the two Israeli co-directors of “No Other Land,” which won the 2025 best documentary Oscar. The other two “No Other Land” co-directors, Hamdan Ballal and Basel Adra, are Palestinian. “No Other Land,” which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, showed the gradual demolition of Palestinian houses and villages in the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank by Israeli military bulldozers.
“NAZA” builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972, Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and The Guardian between 2023 and 2025, according to promotional materials. The potentially explosive doc will premiere in Venice on Sept. 10.
Nathanaël Karmitz, CEO of MK2, and Fionnuala Jamison, managing director, said: “Beyond the power of its testimonies and the rigor of its journalistic approach, the film by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor struck us for the cinematic excellence of its form. The intelligence of its direction resonates deeply with MK2’s history as a film company whose mission has always included giving audiences, through cinema, the keys and tools to confront the truth of the world we live in, however difficult that truth may be.”
“NAZA” is a Guardian production with JW Films, in association with Placeholder Films and Unseen Hand.
The 83rd Venice Film Festival runs from Sept. 2 to 12.
English (US) ·