NAZA, the award-winning documentary from Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, will premiere in theaters in more than 50 countries before its global digital release on theguardian.com. The film, produced by The Guardian, premiered at the Venice film festival earlier this month, where it was greeted with a 25-minute standing ovation, a festival record. The documentary won the special jury prize. Following screenings in Bologna and the San Sebastian Film Festival, the film will have its North American premiere on Saturday at the New York Film Festival before premiering four days later at the IFC Center in New York City. On October 9, it will expand to Los Angeles and other key US cities before its national release. It is also scheduled for theatrical release in association with MK2 Films in 55 other territories, including the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, Hong Kong, Brazil, Turkey, Thailand, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Central America and the Middle East. journalism. “NAZA is based on rigorous journalism published over the past three years,” said Harry Davies, The Guardian’s investigative correspondent and one of NAZA’s producers. “But it is also a powerful work of cinema that will soon be available on screens, large and small, around the world.” Documentary NAZA receives 25-minute ovation at Venice Film Festival premiere – video The film has been offered to a number of distributors and cinemas in Israel, and The Guardian is exploring ways in which NAZA can be seen in the occupied Palestinian territories. The documentary reveals the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. NAZA is a military acronym used euphemistically by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians it expects to be killed in an airstrike. Filmed at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film features interviews with 24 members of the Israeli intelligence and military, granted on condition of anonymity. The film is based on journalism first published by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, an Israeli-Palestinian publication, and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call between 2023 and 2025. In 2024, Abraham and Szor won the Oscar for best documentary for No Other Land, along with their two Palestinian co-directors, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. Jonathan Glazer, the Oscar-winning filmmaker of Hotspot and Under the Skin, has executive produced, while his longtime collaborator, James Wilson of JW Films, also produced the film. The film earned unanimously positive reviews upon its release, but last week Benjamin Netanyahu and several senior military and far-right political figures called for the directors’ citizenship to be revoked and accused them of “treason against the state.” The Israeli prime minister said he would seek new laws that would allow the country to strip citizenship from people who “defame” Israeli soldiers and “defame” the State of Israel. Parallel to the announcement, dozens of right-wing activists gathered in front of Szor’s parents’ house. Police and border police agents were deployed to the scene. One protester called for the “death penalty for traitors” and demanded that the filmmakers’ family homes be demolished. Speaking on Thursday, 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.” The Israeli government’s threats to revoke our citizenship and death threats don’t change that and won’t stop the film. We thank our colleagues for the solidarity and look forward to sharing NAZA around the world very soon.” Last week, 43 local human rights organizations issued a joint statement urging Israeli authorities to stop what they described as incitement and threats against the filmmakers, and not to prosecute them or their sources. More than 1,500 Israeli filmmakers also signed a petition defending “freedom of expression and creation” and expressing solidarity with Szor and Abraham. Their Sentiments have been echoed by several prominent filmmakers around the world, including Ken Loach, Joshua Oppenheimer, Paul Laverty, Laura Poitras, Nan Goldin, Richard Eyre and Hanif Kureishi, the American director of the Oscar-nominated documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, said: “The Israeli government is waging a large-scale intimidation campaign against film directors. “I am shocked and enraged.”
