Cinema

NAZA Opens Worldwide as Israeli Officials Threaten Its Directors

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor's Venice prizewinner about AI-assisted targeting in Gaza is heading to cinemas in 56 territories, then free online, while Israeli officials threaten the directors' citizenship.

Husam Sam Asi 30 September 2026, 17:27 · Updated 3 October 2026, 10:38

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor with the Special Jury Prize for NAZA at the closing ceremony of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, 12 September 2026. Photo: <a href='https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yuval_Abraham_and_Rachel_Szor_with_the_Special_Jury_Prize_for_%E2%80%98Naza%E2%80%99_during_the_closing_ceremony_of_the_Venice_International_Film_Festival_83.jpg'>Ondine Goat / Wikimedia Commons</a>, <a href='https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0'>CC BY-SA 4.0</a>

Two Israeli filmmakers who won an Oscar for documenting life under occupation in the West Bank have turned their cameras on the way Israel’s military chose its targets in Gaza. NAZA, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on 12 September, after a 25-minute standing ovation at its premiere. This week it begins a cinema release across 56 territories. From late November, anyone in the world will be able to watch it free on the Guardian’s website.

Its makers now face something few festival winners ever do: their own government threatening to strip them of their citizenship.

A dinner in Tel Aviv

In the summer of 2024, while I was in Israel shooting a documentary, a group of young Israelis invited me to a home-cooked dinner in an apartment in central Tel Aviv. There were about a dozen of them, all in their early twenties. Some were still serving in the Israeli army, in a cyber unit.

They would not tell me what went on in that unit. But they told me they were worried that they were committing war crimes, and they were morally tormented. “What can we do?” they asked me. They went out to demonstrate against the government, they said, but the government no longer seemed to care about democracy. The only option left was to leave, and they were afraid of that too: afraid of being targeted abroad for being Israeli, or even prosecuted for war crimes.

They never revealed the source of their anxiety. Two years later, NAZA has given me the answer. I do not know whether any of those young people worked on the systems the film describes. But I believe its testimony, from soldiers and intelligence officers describing targets chosen with the help of artificial intelligence and strikes approved in the knowledge that civilians would die, is what they could not bring themselves to tell me.

A military acronym

The title comes from nezek agavi, the Hebrew military term for “collateral damage”: the number of civilians expected to die in a strike. Shot over three years, largely on Tel Aviv rooftops, the 80-minute film gathers testimony from 24 Israeli military and intelligence sources whose identities are concealed. They describe AI-assisted targeting systems, among them one called Lavender, and strikes approved with high expected civilian death tolls.

The film grows out of Abraham’s reporting. In April 2024 he published an investigation for +972 Magazine and Local Call in which intelligence officers said Lavender had marked about 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants, with an error rate of around 10 per cent. At the time, the Israeli military said such systems were tools that assist analysts, who must examine each target independently. NAZA was produced by the Guardian and JW Films, with Jonathan Glazer, director of The Zone of Interest, as executive producer. Harry Davies, the Guardian investigations correspondent who produced the film, says it is “grounded in rigorous journalism published over the past three years”.

Israeli film-makers have questioned their country’s security establishment on screen before. In 2013, Dror Moreh told UKScreen how The Gatekeepers, his Oscar-nominated documentary, brought former heads of the Shin Bet security service on camera to reflect on their decisions. Screening such films in Britain has its own history: in 2014 the Tricycle cinema in Kilburn declined to host the UK Jewish Film Festival while it was part-sponsored by the Israeli embassy’s cultural department.

The reaction in Israel

Within days of the Venice award, Culture Minister Miki Zohar called the film “vile” and said he would “act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship” of both directors for “treason against the state”. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir told them: “You are a disgrace and an embarrassment to the entire people of Israel.” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has pledged legislation to strip citizenship from those who “defame Israeli soldiers”, Al Jazeera reported.

The chief of staff, Lt Gen Eyal Zamir, instructed the Military Advocate General to “examine and advance possible legal actions regarding the film and those involved in it”, and ordered an inquiry into how classified material reached the filmmakers, according to the Times of Israel. The army says it “categorically rejects” the film’s allegations, which Zamir called “blood libels, deliberate distortion of reality, and false and serious accusations”. Responding to testimony about a strike in which 500 civilian deaths were anticipated, the military said it “has never planned, approved, or carried out a strike in Gaza in which 500 civilians or anything near that number were anticipated to be killed”. It has also questioned the use of anonymous witnesses whose identities, it says, “cannot be verified”.

The directors have support at home too. On 16 September, 43 Israeli human rights and peace organisations signed a joint statement defending them and warning that “freedom of expression and freedom of the press are integral to the struggle for democracy”. The International Documentary Association has also called on Israel to end the threats.

Sold out in New York

At the film’s North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on 26 September, both weekend screenings sold out within minutes, the New York Jewish Week reported. Across the street from Lincoln Center, the Israeli-American Council staged a protest with speakers including survivors of the 7 October 2023 attack on the Nova music festival. A smaller group, Israelis for Peace, rallied in support of the filmmakers.

Inside Alice Tully Hall, Abraham addressed his American audience directly. “This is what your country is supporting and funding,” he said, adding that the film’s purpose was to “make denial of what’s going on in Gaza harder”.

Cinemas first, then free for everyone

The release plan is as unusual as the film. The Guardian and the French sales company MK2 Films have placed NAZA with distributors in 56 territories, among them the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, Brazil, Turkey and the Middle East. Dogwoof has UK and Irish rights. Italy gave it a three-day event release on 500 screens from 27 September. In the US the film is self-distributed, opening at New York’s IFC Center before expanding to Los Angeles and other cities from 9 October. It has also been offered to distributors and cinemas in Israel.

After that theatrical window, the Guardian will stream the film free worldwide from late November. Few festival prizewinners are given away. Davies says the aim is for NAZA to be “available on screens, large and small, around the world”.

Abraham and Szor won the Academy Award for best documentary feature at the 2025 Oscars for No Other Land, made with the Palestinian co-directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. In a statement on the release, they said the government’s threats to revoke their citizenship, and the death threats they have received, “will not stop the film”.

Sources: Times of Israel; CBS News; Al Jazeera; New York Jewish Week; TheWrap; InPublishing; Euronews; The National; Jerusalem Post; Screen International; +972 Magazine.