NAZA is the only documentary in the main competition of the 83rd Venice Film Festival, and it reached the Lido by the narrowest of routes. Alberto Barbera’s festival added it to the lineup on 24 August, roughly two weeks before opening and after about a month of what it described as safety discussions; it screens on 10 September in the race for the Golden Lion. Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — two of the four filmmakers behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land — the film is built almost entirely out of testimony its makers gathered in secret.

The 80-minute British production is assembled from interviews with 24 Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers who, the directors say, took part in the surveillance or remote targeting of Palestinians in Gaza. All spoke on condition of anonymity; their faces and voices are digitally altered. The title is a military acronym the filmmakers say Israeli intelligence uses for the number of civilians expected to die in a planned strike — the arithmetic of “collateral damage” turned into the film’s organizing idea. Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, per its official synopsis, NAZA sets out to show “in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”

What makes the film a companion piece to No Other Land rather than a sequel is where it points the camera. That film watched the demolition of Masafer Yatta from the ground; this one turns to the operators and draws on investigations published between 2023 and 2025 by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian, including Abraham’s own reporting on an AI targeting tool the military allegedly nicknamed “Lavender,” said to have generated a list of some 37,000 potential targets. Israel has consistently rejected the charge that it deliberately targets civilians in Gaza; the film’s case rests on the soldiers’ accounts and the reporting behind them, and audiences will weigh it on that basis.

That the pair command a competition slot at all is a measure of how far No Other Land travelled. Assembled by a Palestinian-Israeli collective and made outside the traditional industry, it won the documentary prize at the 2024 Berlinale, took the Academy Award in 2025, and did so despite never securing a conventional US distributor — a film that reached audiences on reputation and urgency rather than a marketing budget. A follow-up from two of its directors therefore arrives with attention already fixed on it, which is precisely what makes both the film’s claims and the festival’s handling of them consequential.

Abraham frames the project as an obligation rather than a provocation. “We’ve always felt a responsibility to document what our country is doing to Palestinians,” he has said, adding that the crew “worked on this film for three years, in total secrecy.” Szor, who handled the look of the anonymised interviews, has said that “cinematically we knew that the people would need to be disguised” — a formal problem the film solves by making concealment part of its texture rather than a disclaimer. The pair have said they hope the film reaches Israeli audiences: “it’s a film Israelis should see.”

The late, guarded selection is itself part of the story — a documentary is a rare thing in a Venice competition that leads with fiction, and a documentary this contested is rarer still. NAZA is produced by The Guardian and James Wilson’s JW Films and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, with MK2 Films handling world sales. It competes for the Golden Lion, awarded on 12 September by the jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal.

Tags: Venice Film Festival, 2026, awards, Jonathan Glazer, NAZA, Rachel Szor