NAZA review: Portrait of Israel as a nation stuck in a moral abyss
Joseph Fahim writes in Middle East Eye on 24 September 2026:
On 24 August, only nine days before the start of the Venice International Film Festival, a report in The Guardian announced an addition to the lineup. NAZA, by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Israeli co-directors of 2024 Oscar-winner No Other Land, would premiere in the main competition.
On the Venice Lido, the film, which “reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza”, was met with a 25-minute standing ovation and later won the Special Jury Prize.
Within days, France’s mk2 films announced that it had come on board as sales agent, while several major autumn festivals, including San Sebastian and New York, confirmed its inclusion in their lineups. Building on this, NAZA is being rushed into cinemas across the world, including Germany and the US in the coming weeks, which will surely intensify interest, before streaming for free on The Guardian.
Produced by The Guardian and James Wilson (The Voice of Hind Rajab), and executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer, Oscar-winning director of The Zone of Interest, NAZA was presented in advance of its premiere as the biggest filmic expose of Israel’s security apparatus.
Yet none of the early reports could prepare the audiences at Venice for the horrors it unleashes. This is a stark document that unflinchingly looks evil in the eye, forcing us to confront the grisliest and most terrifying facets of the genocide in Gaza that no image has been able to convey.
Few of its findings are new, and have been previously revealed by Al Jazeera, The Guardian, Forensic Architecture and +972 among others. Likewise, Abraham has stated in interviews that the violations covered in NAZA have been repeatedly reported by Palestinians for several years, yet nobody paid any notice.
That they are attracting attention now is testament to the power of cinema rather than any superior investigation by Abraham and Szor. It also points to the grave importance of NAZA as the staunchest and most damning denunciation of Israel and its army since 7 October.
For NAZA is a work not targeted at Arabs or supporters of the Palestinian cause but rather Israelis who still brand Gaza as “false genocide”; the Zionists of the US, Germany, UK, France and elsewhere, who will never listen to the voices of oppressed Palestinians; and the incredulous and indifferent millions worldwide who may now begin to question their convictions.
Nowhere has the conversation about the issues raised by NAZA been more intense than in Israel, where commercial distribution is highly unlikely. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is facing a general election next month, and other politicians have demanded that Abraham and Szor be stripped of their Israeli citizenship, demonstrating again how the Zionist state is anything but a democracy. The Israeli Film Council has recommended state funding for films celebrating the “heroism” of Israeli soldiers.
In Haaretz, prominent Israeli journalist Gideon Levy wrote that “[NAZA] has elicited a nationwide uproar. After years of repression, denial and lies, apathy and indifference, the pus has burst forth in a mighty stream.”