NAZA: Venice Film Festival Adds ‘No Other Land’ Team’s Newest Documentary to the Main Competition
After taking the world by storm with their Oscar-winning documentary and IFSN Advocate Award winner No Other Land, two of the co-directors, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, are bringing a new look at the Gazan genocide to the 83rd Venice Film Festival. The duo’s newest documentary, Naza, was just added to the main competition, where it will compete for the prestigious Golden Lion prize.
It has been produced by The Guardian and Oscar nominee James Wilson, and executive produced by Oscar-winning director Jonathan Glazer, who was also an EP on The Voice of Hind Rajab. Wilson and Glazer also worked together on the Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest. The film will have its world premiere at the festival on September 10. It will be the only documentary playing in the main competition.
As the official synopsis from the festival reads:
In secret conversations on the rooftops of Tel Aviv at night, the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza are revealed by the people who designed and operated them.
As The Guardian itself reported on the film’s addition to Venice, “The film’s title – NAZA – 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.”
The directors said in a statement: “We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israelis to examine a system of mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible. While filming military officers 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 dehumanisation of another? What do the inner workings of such a system look like? 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 +972 Magazine and Local Call in collaboration with The Guardian, which has made this film with us. 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.”
