Venice Adds Gaza Doc ‘Naza’ to Competition
The Venice Film Festival has added Naza, a politically-charged documentary from No Other Land filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor to its competition line-up for this year.
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The documentary claims to reveal in detail “the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”
The film builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and The Guardian between 2023 and 2025. Naza was produced by The Guardian and James Wilson at JW Films in association with Placeholder Films and Unseen Hand. Wilson produced Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest. Glazer is an executive producer on Naza. According to the producers, the film’s title “comes from a military acronym euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that it expects will be killed in an airstrike.”
The doc will have its world premiere in Venice on Sept. 10. It is the only feature documentary picked for competition this year.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are two of the four co-directors of No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary that chronicled violent evictions of Palestinians from their homes in the occupied West Bank.
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The Israeli-Palestinian conflict took center stage at the Venice Film festival last year, with the world premiere of The Voice of Hind Rajab, a ticking-clock docudrama from Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania about about efforts to save a five-year-old Palestinian girl killed by the Israeli forces in Gaza. [The Israeli military investigation last week announced an official investigation into Hind Rajab’s death, a move Ben Hania has dismissed as “a smokescreen.”].
The Venice audience embraced the film, giving it a festival-best 22-minute standing ovation. The Voice of Hind Rajab won the Silver Lion Grand Jury award, the runner-up prize, losing out to best film Golden Lion winner Father Mother Sister Brother from Jim Jarmusch.
Ahead of the 2025 festival, thousands had marched on the Lido to protest Israeli military action in Gaza, and a group of international filmmakers and artists had pressed Barbera to take a “clear and unambiguous stand” by condemning the war as a “genocide.” He didn’t, though he expressed his “huge sadness and suffering vis-à-vis what is happening in Gaza and Palestine.”
While Naza will be the only documentary on the conflict in competition, there are several other Venice-bound docs on the crisis in the region. Ahmed Hassouna’s Citizen Osama profiles a photojournalist navigating survival and fatherhood in besieged Gaza. Muayad Alayan’s Conversation with the Sea follows a Palestinian man caught up in Israeli bureaucracy. And Road to Jericho, a documentary from Israeli director Amos Gitai, tracks the fate of Khan al-Ahmar, a Bedouin hamlet outside Jerusalem on the verge of being erased by the Israeli state.
The 83rd Venice International Film Festival runs Sept. 2-12.
