Katharine Viner, editor-in-chief, The Guardian
Last month, the documentary movie NAZA, produced by the Guardian, received the longest standing ovation in the history of the Venice international film festival, where it had its global premiere and won the special jury prize. Filmed on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the documentary features interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers involved in the surveillance and remote killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
In the weeks since, NAZA has received widespread critical acclaim and is selling out cinemas across the world, where it has already been seen by several hundred thousand cinemagoers. On Thursday, I joined the team behind the film on stage at south London’s Ritzy cinema for a Q&A to mark its UK release. In a conversation broadcast live to more than 100 cinemas across the UK, Yuval Abraham, one of the film’s Israeli directors, told me that the film allows viewers to look at the “mechanisms that allow human beings to do this to other human beings.”
The last six weeks have been a whirlwind for Yuval and his co-director, Rachel Szor, who won an Oscar in 2025 for No Other Land, a film about Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank. NAZA is a very different film. It puts an unflinching lens on Israel’s systems of calculated mass killing in Gaza, conveyed through the testimonies of some of those who designed and operated them.
For Yuval and Rachel, the release of NAZA has come at a significant personal cost in their home country. Before it was seen in Israel, their government had denounced the pair as traitors and said their citizenship would be revoked. Mobs protested outside Rachel’s family home, calling for the “death penalty for traitors”. The Israeli army has said the soldiers’ testimonies are false or inaccurate. Prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu this week ordered officials to unmask the confidential sources who took part in the film and prosecute them for revealing state secrets.
We believe the best response to these authoritarian moves is for viewers to watch the film and make up their own minds. NAZA builds on more than three years of investigative reporting we have published in partnership with the Israeli Palestinian magazine +972. The film relied on interviews with more than 100 sources familiar with the Israeli military’s systems.
In addition to Yuval and Rachel, the work of producing the film involved a small team of Guardian staff: Paul Lewis, Harry Davies, Nicole Jackson, Noa Yachot, Lindsay Poulton and Ekaterina Ochagavia. It was co-produced by James Wilson and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, the team behind the brilliant Oscar-winning film The Zone of Interest.
It is in many ways a marriage between journalism and cinema, and I would strongly encourage you to watch NAZA on a big screen if you can. (If you are in the UK, you can find the nearest cinemas showing the film here; it is also showing in many hundreds more cinemas across Europe, North America and around the world.) For those who don’t get to see NAZA in cinemas, we will be streaming it for free in late November at theguardian.com.
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