Phoenix 24
The documentary turns military language and anonymous testimony into an examination of how civilian deaths become institutional calculations.
VENICE, ITALY
NAZA, a documentary directed by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, received a nearly 25-minute standing ovation at the Venice International Film Festival. Reported as the longest ovation recorded at Venice—and possibly at any major film festival—the response included Palestinian flags raised inside the theatre. The film is competing for the Golden Lion as the festival’s only documentary in the main competition.
The title comes from an Israeli military acronym referring to civilians expected to die during an attack. Rather than concentrating on battlefield footage, the documentary examines the systems through which people are identified, monitored and selected as targets. Its central witnesses are 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers whose faces and voices were digitally altered to protect their identities.
Filmed secretly over three years on rooftops in Tel Aviv, the interviews describe surveillance networks, intercepted communications and artificial-intelligence-assisted targeting. According to the participants, suspected Hamas members were sometimes attacked in residential buildings despite advance knowledge that relatives and other civilians were present. They also recount operations in areas whose restrictions were allegedly not communicated to Gaza’s population.
These accounts challenge Israel’s assertion that its armed forces seek to minimize civilian casualties and that Hamas bears responsibility for placing military operations within populated areas. The Israeli military acknowledges using artificial intelligence to assist target identification but maintains that humans authorize every strike. It did not immediately provide a detailed response to the documentary’s specific allegations.
Abraham and Szor, two of the four filmmakers behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land, deliberately avoid presenting the interviewees as uncomplicated whistleblowing heroes. Some express remorse, while others speak with detachment or pride. The directors instead focus on the institutional structure surrounding their actions: the terminology, policies and routines capable of converting civilian life into an acceptable operational cost.
The documentary builds upon investigations previously published by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian. Producer James Wilson and executive producer Jonathan Glazer, whose creative team worked on The Zone of Interest, helped bring those findings to the screen. Images of Gaza’s destruction appear only briefly, sharpening the contrast between normal life in Tel Aviv and devastation approximately 60 kilometres away.
Its extraordinary reception does not verify every allegation or determine legal responsibility. It does, however, demonstrate cinema’s capacity to make bureaucratic violence visible. By allowing insiders to describe the machinery in their own technical language, NAZA shifts attention from whether individual attacks were mistakes to whether civilian death had become embedded within the system itself.
When institutions convert lives into calculations, testimony becomes an act of resistance.