Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s NAZA has landed a sensational 25-minute ovation following its world premiere screening this evening at the Venice Film Festival.
The powerful documentary screened this evening in the Sala Grande in Venice, with Abraham and Szor in attendance, alongside producer Jonathan Glazer. Israeli filmmakers Abraham and Szor previously worked together with two Palestinian filmmakers on the Oscar-winning No Other Land.
The pair looked solemn as applause erupted for the documentary exposing the calculated targeting of civilians in Gaza in missile strikes by Israeli military through the testimony of intelligence personnel and soldiers involved in the killing.
The 25-minute ovation sets a new record for any movie at a major festival, surpassing the near 24 minutes scored by The Voice Of Hind Rajab at last year’s Venice festival and the 22 minutes scored by Guillermo Del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s comfortably the longest ovation at this year’s Venice.
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Fittingly, The Voice of Hind Rajab director Kaouther ben Hania, who is on the jury this year, and its producer Nadim Cheikhrouha were both in the room. The directors were joined by NAZA producer James Wilson, who also took credits on The Voice of Hind Rajab, and executive producer Jonathan Glazer.
As the lights went up members of the audience also started unfurling Palestinian flags as well as one or two Lebanese flags. It seemed at one point that security guards were going to force them to put them
The record applause comes after the film received very strong early notices from critics. You can read them here.
The film has been produced by the news outlet The Guardian alongside James Wilson (JW Films) and executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer. Wilson and Glazer are the Oscar-winning team behind The Zone of Interest.
The film’s synopsis reads: “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”.
The title NAZA appears throughout the documentary, a military acronym euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that it expects will be killed in an airstrike.
In a statement, Abraham and Szor said they made this film “out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israelis to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible.”
“While filming over the past three years, we found ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents’ generation and throughout the 20th century: how does one group of people allow the total dehumanisation of another?” their statement continued. “What do the inner workings of such a system look like?”
The statement adds: “The film lets us explore something deeper than we could in our investigative journalism alone: not only the words being said but also those that are not said, the silence. It is up to all of us to break that silence.”
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Andreas Wiseman contributed to this report.
