NAZA, Documentary on Israel’s Mass Killing of Palestinian Civilians, Added to San Sebastian Film Festival

NAZA, the documentary on Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza by Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, will complete the Perlak section of the San Sebastian International Film Festival.

The film, produced by The Guardian and JW Films, with Jonathan Glazer as its executive producer, will compete for the City of Donostia / San Sebastián Audience Award following its world premiere next week at the Venice Film Festival, where it will compete for the Golden Lion.

Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. NAZA is the euphemistic acronym used by the Israeli intelligence services to indicate the expected number of civilian deaths in a planned airstrike.

Along with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, Abraham and Szor co-directed the film No Other Land, winner of the Best Documentary Award in the Panorama section of the Berlinale, followed by the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film. James Wilson (JW Films) was part of the team which produced The Zone of Interest, directed by Jonathan Glazer, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film.

In a statetement, co-directors’ Abraham and Szor said, “We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israelis to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible. While filming 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 dehumanisation 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 October 7th 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.”