A new documentary about Israel’s bombing campaign in Gaza, produced by the Guardian, is set to receive its world premiere at the Venice film festival. The film, called NAZA, lands in the festival circuit as a cultural object built from the wreckage of mass killing, then dressed up for the Golden Lion competition. The machinery of prestige never sleeps.
Prestige, War, and the Festival Circuit
The film is directed by Oscar-winning directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and is the only documentary competing this year for Venice’s Golden Lion. That detail matters. Venice is not just screening a documentary; it is selecting one story about Gaza to sit inside a hierarchy of prizes, institutions, and cultural gatekeepers while the bombing campaign itself remains the subject. The film has been produced with Jim Wilson and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer, the team behind The Zone of Interest.
The filmmakers said: “Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” That line places the film’s focus squarely on systems, not accidents. The Guardian said in a statement that NAZA is an Israeli military acronym used euphemistically by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that it expects will be killed in an airstrike. Bureaucratic language, lethal arithmetic. The state’s preferred style.
The documentary builds on original investigative reporting between 2023 and 2025 by Israeli-Palestinian publication +972, Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and the Guardian. That reporting trail matters because it shows how the story was assembled across outlets and years, not conjured by festival marketing. The film is not arriving from nowhere. It comes out of sustained reporting on a war that has already been documented, named, and dissected by journalists who followed the evidence.
The People Behind the Camera, and the People Under the Bombs
No Other Land was directed by Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal alongside Abraham and Szor, and the Guardian’s chief film critic Peter Bradshaw described it as a “sombre, sobering work.” The phrase fits the subject, though the festival frame gives it a polished surface. The documentary’s pedigree now includes an Oscar for best documentary in 2025, which it won one year ago. Awards pile up. The violence does not stop.
Shortly after No Other Land’s Oscar win, Ballal was attacked by Israeli settlers and briefly arrested. That sequence says more about the world around the film than any red-carpet ceremony can. A filmmaker is attacked, then detained, and the institutions that hand out prizes and statements move at their own careful pace. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences later apologised after failing to name Ballal or the film in a statement of support.
That apology came after the omission had already done its work. The Academy could issue regret later. Ballal had already been attacked and briefly arrested. The film had already won its Oscar. The documentary’s new premiere at Venice now places Gaza’s destruction inside another elite venue, where the language of art, conscience, and competition sits neatly beside the facts of bombing, euphemism, and state violence.
Who Gets Named, Who Gets Erased
The Guardian’s statement, the Academy’s apology, the festival’s competition slot, and the filmmakers’ own description all circle the same brutal core: a bombing campaign in Gaza and the systems behind it. Yet the institutions around the film still manage to turn catastrophe into programming, prestige, and carefully managed recognition. The names of the directors travel easily. The people under the bombs do not get that luxury.
NAZA arrives at Venice as a documentary about calculated mass killing, produced by a major newspaper, carried by award-winning filmmakers, and framed by the same cultural institutions that love to congratulate themselves for paying attention after the fact. The film may expose the system. The system still gets the premiere.