Gaza documentary NAZA beats Avengers Endgame: Encore to top Italian box office

NAZA, the award-winning documentary about Israel’s systemic mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, has opened at No 1 at the Italian box office, beating rival titles including Avengers Endgame: Encore, which came in at No 2.

The 80-minute film was booked for a three-day run in Italy, but after sold-out auditoriums and positive audience reaction, its release window will be extended. On its opening day on Monday, the documentary took a total of €451,872, with a per site average of €1,153.

By the end of Tuesday, this rose to about €1.1m. Avengers Endgame: Encore – a rerelease of the 2019 blockbuster featuring a new introduction and post-credits scene – made €356,000 over the same period.

Appetite in Italy was particularly primed for the film, which was directed by Oscar-winning film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and produced by the Guardian, and won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice film festival earlier this month. Its premiere a few days before was met with a 25-minute ovation – a festival record.

In packed cinemas across Italy some people in the audience held the Palestinian flag and there was applause at the end of the film. But at the Tibur, a small cinema in the San Lorenzo area of Rome where NAZA is being screened in both of its auditoriums, the audience watched in complete silence. “In general, the public was in shock as they watched,” said Marco, a member of staff at the cinema. “There was silence throughout the whole film. Even at the end, nobody spoke.” The film’s run at the Tibur has been extended for at least another week, he added.

More than 150 other cinemas in Italy have extended programming and the number is expected to grow. “As long as theatres want to show it, NAZA will continue to be screened,” Andrea Romeo, founder of I Wonder Pictures, the film’s distributor in Italy, told La Repubblica.

Simone Gialdini, president of Anec, a trade association representing cinema owners, said that while the massive turnout can partly be explained by the film’s political nature and a strong desire among activists “to send a strong signal about a terrible situation that has been dragging on for years”, it has drawn a diverse audience of all ages that might not ordinarily be associated with this kind of film. “It is an audience that knows what it is going to see and is aware of the tragedy we are living through,” he told La Repubblica.

The film, which will be released in more than 50 territories over the next month before being made freely available on theguardian.com in mid November, features the testimony of 24 anonymised Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, who describe the AI-powered surveillance systems used to select their targets.

The project takes its name from an acronym used euphemistically by Israeli intelligence to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike.

Filmed in secret on rooftops in Tel Aviv, NAZA builds on reporting published from 2023 to 2025 in the Guardian; +972 Magazine, an Israeli-Palestinian publication; and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.

The documentary opens in New York on Wednesday, before a wider release rolls out across the US from 9 October. Speaking at its North American premiere on Saturday, Abraham and Szor addressed the escalating threats by Israeli officials to strip them of their citizenship for making the film.

“Our country is doing so much to hide these systems,” Szor told the audience at the post-screening Q&A. “It’s not a world that is open even to the Israeli public.”

Added Abraham: “These crimes that you saw are ongoing. They’re ongoing because it’s what our country is doing, and because of what your country is supporting and funding.”