Monday, September 14, 2026

"NAZA" Gets the Longest Standing Ovation in the History of the Venice Film Festival

NAZA - Photo: courtesy of The Guardian

I saw NAZA, the film, at the Venice Film Festival on the morning of Thursday, September 10. That afternoon, I attended the press conference, so I was in the same room as Israeli filmmakers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham in real time. Later that evening, NAZA would receive a 24.5-minute standing ovation, the longest in the history of the Venice Film Festival. 

On Saturday, September 12, the film received the Special Jury Prize at the awards ceremony, an honor that recognizes outstanding work.

On Sunday, September 13, Miki Zohar, the Israeli Minister of Culture and Sports, posted on X that he would "act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for betraying the state."

Photo: Ondine Goat

NAZA means collateral damage. It's a rough translation of nezek agavi, a Hebrew military acronym. NAZA is the term used by the Israeli Defense Forces, the infamous IDF, to indicate the number of civilians they expect to be killed as collateral damage in an airstrike.  
 
NAZA, the film, exposes the IDF's military use of AI-powered targeting systems to conduct automated strikes in Gaza. Directed by Academy Award winners Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham, two Israeli filmmakers, we witness the testimonies of 24 anonymous elite military intelligence officers and soldiers on the rooftops of Tel Aviv at night as they describe a cold, robotic system designed to compute the acceptable number of innocent men, women, and children who can be killed for each Hamas target. 

NAZA challenges the narrative that Hamas uses the civilians of Gaza as human shields. Instead, the targeted killing of Palestinians in Gaza is part of an ongoing, calculated system used by Israel that knows in advance that innocent civilians will be massacred and does it anyway. 

The interviewees in the film were 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers, all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity. They were based in Tel Aviv and involved in the surveillance or remote killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza about 37 miles (60 kilometers) away. Their appearance and voices were digitally altered to disguise their identities. 

The core question was: How does the system work?
 
Lavender is the sweet-scented name of the AI software used to select the targets to kill. It does not look directly at a person. Instead, the AI uses algorithms to look at patterns. It calculates how frequently a specific phone number interacts with other phone numbers already in the database identified as militants.

The Lavender software assigns each individual phone a mathematical probability score from 1 to 100. Enough interaction with a specific target phone number then makes you a target -- you get classified as a "low-ranking target." 

The IDF soldiers can then drop a bomb on the low-ranking target, even if you are surrounded by innocent civilians. They can kill up to 15 or 20 innocent neighbors or family members per target, who, after all, are only NAZA, collateral damage, not actual human beings. 
 
For high-ranking senior commanders, the allowance jumps to up to 300 or 500 civilian deaths for a single strike, destroying entire villages or neighborhoods for one target.  
 
To be clear: civilian deaths are not unexpected accidents. They are calculated, permissible metrics built into the software. One insider in the film described the operation as working "like a factory." When an algorithm dictates that 20 human lives are a fair trade for a low-level target, it removes the moral choice of the soldier pushing the button. Another soldier described it as "insane fun." 

Beyond Lavender, the military utilizes another automated system named "Where's Daddy?" This software continuously tracks the location of flagged targets, waiting for their phone signals to connect to their home Wi-Fi. Apparently, it is easier to strike targets while they are at home rather than out and about. The phrase "Daddy's home" picked up on a hacked child's mobile phone would be enough to trigger an airstrike on the family's house. 

Directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor at NAZA press conference
Photo: Cat Bauer

During the press conference, a German journalist asked why so few foreign correspondents covered what the filmmakers had shown in the film. Why were they so cowardly or cautious?

The question was answered by Paul Lewis, an award-winning investigative journalist and the Head of Investigations at The Guardian, who served as an executive producer. He said that Israel is not an easy place to be a foreign correspondent. The film was built on years of painstaking journalism -- it takes years to develop relationships and trust. "This is the type of film that only Israeli filmmakers would have been able to make." 

Another journalist asked if the panel was concerned about being attacked as antisemitic, as actor Mark Ruffalo was recently after wading into the controversial Paramount-Warner merger. Ruffalo had also accused the Ellison family, who acquired Paramount last year, of being complicit in the genocide against Palestinians, which, he said, "was built on an apartheid system of oppression powered by Oracle."

That question was answered by Oscar-nominated writer-director Jim Wilson, who produced NAZA along with executive producer Oscar-winning writer-director Jonathan Glazer. "Unlike Mark Ruffalo, I'm Jewish. Yuval and Rachel are Jewish Israelis, and Jonathan Glazer is Jewish. I'm not saying that means we're right or wrong. I'm personally not worried about being publicly accused of being antisemitic because I am not, and I don't think my colleagues are. I'm not being coy, and I'm not being naive. I understand the nature of the attack... I think it's a way of continuing to repress the truth. I don't myself think there is any connection with Judaism, or Jewishness, and the policy of the Israeli government toward the Palestinian people."
Directors’ note

We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli filmmakers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible. While filming members of Israel’s military on rooftops at night in Tel Aviv 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.

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor
NAZA will screen at the New York Film Festival on September 26 and 27. For further details, visit Film at Lincoln Center. Distribution details for the general public are not yet confirmed. 

NAZA

World Premiere: Venice Film Festival, September 10, 2026

Directed by: Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor 

Produced by: Harry Davies, Lindsay Poulton, & James Wilson

Executive Producer: Jonathan Glazer

Executive Producers for The Guardian: Paul Lewis & Nicole Jackson

Ciao from Venezia,
Cat Bauer
Posted by Venice Gazette blog by Cat Bauer at 5:19 PM 0 comments
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