The trailer for “NAZA” dropped Friday morning, giving audiences a glimpse of what to expect from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s illuminating documentary — with the subtitle, “A Window Into Systems of Mass Killing”
“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,” per the logline. A text interstitial further adds: “Featuring interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers involved in the remote mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”
“Believe me, I’m sparing you a lot of things,” one participant says, via translation.
The movie premiered at the Venice Film Festival (winning the Special Jury Prize) and will have its North American premiere on Saturday at the New York Film Festival before opening four days later at the IFC Center in NYC, followed by an expansion to Los Angeles and other U.S. cities on Oct. 9 as part of a self-distribution model. The documentary will then stream for free on The Guardian website following its impending international rollout.
Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar has since moved to revoke Abraham and Szor’s citizenship for betraying the state with their follow-up to their Oscar-winning doc “No Other Land.”
“We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli filmmakers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible,” the pair shared in a statement. “While filming members of Israel’s military on rooftops at night in Tel Aviv 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? What do the inner workings of such a system look like?”
“Many of the revelations in the film were published almost immediately as we learned of them, in the months following the October 7th attacks, by The Guardian (one of NAZA’s producers), in collaboration with reporting partners +972 Magazine and Local Call,” they continued. “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.”
Jonathan Glazer executive produced, with Harry Davies, Lindsay Poulton and James Wilson producing for The Guardian, JW Films and mk2.
