‘NAZA’: What The Critics Are Saying About Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor’s Israel-Gaza Documentary

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s anticipated documentary NAZA has landed at the Venice Film Festival and the reviews are coming in.

The two Israeli filmmakers previously worked together with two Palestinian filmmakers on the Oscar-winning No Other Land. Their new film, according to the synopsis, “shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”

The film has been produced by the news outlet The Guardian alongside James Wilson (JW Films) and executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer. Wilson and Glazer are the Oscar-winning team behind The Zone of Interest. 

The early notices are very strong for the film.

The Hollywood Reporter calls the film “a sober and indispensable doc highlighting the immoral, state-of-the-art killing machine employed by the IDF in Gaza”: “It’s hard to describe all of the feelings provoked by watching a film like Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s Naza. Outrage for sure. Indignity as well. Most certainly disgust, on a profound level, for the current Israeli regime and its prime minister, Bibi Netanyahu.”

Indiewire gives the film an A score: “A documentary exposing the brutal machinery of modern genocide, “NAZA” gets its name from a euphemistic acronym casually employed by Israeli intelligence. It refers to the number of civilians designated “Nezek Agavi” or collateral damage in an air strike — which is to say, before an air strike. The title is also an onomatopoeia: the film may be journalistic in origin, but its cinematic effects are downright nauseating. Over a mere 80 minutes filmed on rooftops in Tel Aviv, the Israeli half of the collective behind West Bank land-grab doc “No Other Land” — directors Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham — interview anonymous IDF sources who detail their methodology in drawings and words. Their silences, however, are just as revealing.”

IonCinema gives the film 4/5 stars: “Although most of the documentary indeed consists of clandestine conversations on rooftops, several well-placed archival moments underline contradictory elements at play, including an old clip of Netanyahu clearly stating the murder of innocent women and children for political gain or leverage is indeed terrorism. The formidable hypocrisy of Israeli news stations covering Holocaust Remembrance day, including an honorarium for Claude Lanzmann, in the midst of their barbarity, is a wretched but necessary visualization of the flabbergasting depth of contradiction at play.”

Next Best Picture gives the film 9/10 and flags its Best Documentary Oscar credentials: “A captivating portrait that highlights the horrific conflict in Gaza, with perspectives that detail a disturbing system of administering carnage. The subjects bring insightful detail of frightening practices, and the filmmaking helps to underline the thematic commentary of the disconnect between levels of humanity. It’s an important message that’s communicated in an engrossing manner.”

Screen International calls the film an “urgent, gut-punch doc from the No Other Land directors, while The Wrap calls it a “bleak indictment of the IDF”.

The International Cinephile Society gives it 4.5/5 stars, noting: “In No Other Land, Abraham and Szor told a story by directly documenting it. In NAZA the scope, as well as the importance, is bigger, but the film’s strongest feat is not its story, but the added cinematic contemplation on who lives and who dies, and how similar the two are.”

The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw gives the film 4/5 stars. In an otherwise positive write-up Bradshaw highlights one or two flaws, including the challenge of not being able to reveal their sources. At another point he writes: “The ahistorical comparison to nazism is inevitably and glibly invoked by one speaker. But Gaza, however horrendous, is not the same as the Holocaust. This specious parallel is all too readily available; the bombing of Dresden is the more obvious comparison. At all events, the anguish of Gaza is brought into pin-sharp focus.”