‘NAZA’ Israel-Gaza War Doc Sets U.S. Theatrical Release

NAZA, the Israel–Gaza war documentary that is sparking a political storm in Israel after winning the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, is getting a theatrical release in the U.S.

The film, by Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, part of the directorial team behind the 2024 Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, will launch exclusively at the IFC Center in New York City. NAZA will expand to Los Angeles and other key markets on Oct. 9, ahead of a national rollout in the weeks to follow.

“Due to the urgency of the movie’s subject matter, the filmmakers are moving ahead with an innovative distribution model, spearheaded by The Guardian and mk2, who have assembled a team of U.S. 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,” the NAZA producers said in a statement.

The documentary, to have a North American premiere at The New York Film Festival on Sept. 26, is produced by Jonathan Glazer (The Zone of Interest) features testimony from 24 Israeli military officers outlining the systems and protocols they allege Israel uses to target and kill Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The film’s title, NAZA, comes from an acronym the Israeli military uses as a shorthand for civilian casualties.

Directors Abraham and Szor added in their own statement: “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. 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? Many of the revelations in the film were published almost immediately as we learned of them, in the months following the Oct. 7 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,” Abraham and Szor added.

While NAZA received a prolonged standing ovation at Venice, the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) in a statement said it “categorically rejects” the film’s allegations and criticized the use of anonymous testimonies, which it said “cannot be verified.” It repeated claims that “the IDF strikes military targets and makes unprecedented efforts to minimize harm to civilians.”

IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir in another statement said the documentary, in which IDF soldiers outline what they claim are Israel’s tactics of deliberately targeting civilians in Gaza, constitutes “an attack on the State of Israel.”

NAZA was produced by Guardian News and Media, the company that also publishes British newspaper The Guardian.