Gaza documentary NAZA to premiere at Venice festival

A new Gaza documentary called “NAZA” will premiere at the Venice Film Festival next month and compete for the Golden Lion award, organisers said on Monday.

The film is directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four co-directors of the Oscar-winning Israeli-Palestinian production “No Other Land”. The festival synopsis says “NAZA” is about “the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza”.

The film is produced by The Guardian and James Wilson of JW Films and executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer. Wilson and Glazer were behind “The Zone of Interest”, the Oscar-winning film set in Auschwitz concentration camp.

The Guardian said NAZA is an Israeli military acronym used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians it expects will be killed in an airstrike.

The film is due to be screened on September 10 in the presence of the directors, producers, Guardian journalists and the official delegation. It is the only documentary among the 21 films competing for the Golden Lion at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival.

Hamas launched an attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, that resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. Militants also took 251 hostages to Gaza.

Israel's retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 73,000 people, according to the territory's health ministry, which operates under Hamas authority and whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations. A ceasefire took hold in October, but progress on permanently ending the war has stalled, and Israeli forces currently control nearly 70 percent of the territory.