Naza won the special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival after a premiere that drew about a 24 and a half minute ovation, while audience members held up Palestinian flags and a documentary about Israeli military operations in Gaza played to a room already primed for the usual festival ritual: applause for catastrophe, then everyone goes back to their badges.
The Machine Speaks Through Its Own People
The documentary, by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, examines Israeli military operations in Gaza through testimony from military and intelligence sources. It draws on an investigation spanning almost three years and interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers. The participants were filmed at night on Tel Aviv rooftops, with their faces and voices digitally altered to protect their identities. Before the 80-minute documentary's premiere, Abraham told AFP, "We are letting the soldiers and the officers speak about what they did."
That line does a lot of work. So does the film’s title. Naza comes from an Israeli military term referring to the number of civilians expected to be killed in an air strike. The documentary examines the use of artificial intelligence in selecting targets, with interviewees describing operations carried out despite knowledge that civilians were present. The film’s subject is not abstract war. It’s the bureaucratic arithmetic of killing, spoken in the language of command rooms and sanitized by digital blur.
At Thursday’s premiere, the audience response stretched to about 24 and a half minutes. The flags went up. The festival machinery kept moving. Venice handed the film a prize on Saturday, and the awards panel, led by Maggie Gyllenhaal, treated the testimony as cinema, which of course it is, and also as evidence, which is harder to ignore.
Women, War, and the Structures That Sort Them
The Golden Lion went to Danish-Egyptian director May el-Toukhy for Woman Unknown, a post-war drama set in Denmark. The film also earned Mathilde Arcel the Volpi Cup for Best Actress for her role as Marie, a housemaid preparing to marry her wealthy employer while hiding a wartime relationship with a German soldier. The Danish, Swedish and Latvian production follows Marie’s attempts to protect her future at a time when women accused of relationships with occupying soldiers face public punishment.
El-Toukhy said at her film’s news conference that she thought the imbalance in the main competition, where Woman Unknown was the only entry solely directed by a woman, was "very, very much a structural problem" and that she had lots of experience with it. She said the obstacles extended from getting a first film made to the budgets and opportunities available later in a director’s career. That’s the polite version of how institutions ration access and call it merit.
Accepting the prize, el-Toukhy said, "What kept me going was the urgent need to illuminate the unknown women of our common history, to make them known." Born in Copenhagen to a Danish mother and an Egyptian father, she previously directed Long Story Short and Queen of Hearts. Queen of Hearts won the Audience Award in the Sundance Film Festival's World Cinema Dramatic Competition in 2019.
Juries, Prizes, and the Festival State
The awards were decided by a jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Other members of the panel included Tunisian filmmaker Kaouther Ben Hania and Afghan director Shahrbanoo Sadat. Ben Hania later praised Naza’s portrayal of "fresh history" and said, "Those two brilliant directors found a way with the constraints of filming testimonies anonymously." She added, "And it's not about their feelings. They are cogs in a bigger machine. I found this just brilliant, necessary, and very important in a time when we are talking a lot about denial. And also the fact that they are filming fresh history. The genocide is still ongoing. This is brave. And they did it in a very strong, cinematic way. That's why I think it's important to recognize the courage, the vision, and also the importance of this movie."
Ben Hania was part of a jury led by Maggie Gyllenhaal a year after her Gaza-set film, The Voice of Hind Rajab, won Venice’s Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize. Her drama reconstructs the efforts to rescue a Palestinian girl trapped in a car under Israeli fire, using recordings of her calls to the Palestine Red Crescent Society.
Lebanese-Moroccan filmmaker Shaden Safieddine Tazi won the Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film for A Few Moments of Happiness, a documentary about a Lebanese filmmaker in Paris watching the conflict in Lebanon through her phone. The film combines screen recordings and family voices to convey the experience of witnessing events from abroad.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor previously co-directed No Other Land with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. That documentary, about the displacement of Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank, won the Oscar for best documentary feature in 2025. The National reported both awards on September 13, 2026.