Gaza documentary NAZA draws the longest ovation in Venice history
Twenty-four and a half minutes, beating last year’s record. The film rests on anonymous testimony from 24 Israeli intelligence officers.
A documentary about the Israeli military's civilian casualty calculations in Gaza received a 24.5-minute standing ovation at its Venice premiere on Thursday — the longest in the festival's history, and reportedly the longest recorded at any major film festival.
NAZA, directed by the Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, beat the 22 minutes given to The Voice of Hind Rajab last year. With Venice closing on Saturday, it will be the largest ovation of this year's edition.
What the title refers to
The film takes its name from a term the documentary says is used within Israeli intelligence. According to the film, NAZA is an acronym for collateral damage — the figure representing how many civilians are expected to be killed in a given airstrike.
Its official synopsis says the film shows "in detail the systems behind Israel's calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza". That is the film-makers' characterisation of their own work, and the allegations in it are theirs and their interviewees'.
The Guardian's reviewer suggested the term may acquire the connotations that "body count" carried during the Vietnam war for the American military.
How it was made
The production method is central both to the film's claims and to the reservations about them.
NAZA was shot in secrecy, at night, on rooftops in Tel Aviv — the city where Israeli intelligence is based. It features interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers, all speaking anonymously, their faces in shadow and their appearances and voices digitally altered.
The interviewees reject the concept of human shields as an explanation for civilian deaths, arguing the issue is not Hamas operatives concealing themselves among civilians.
The Guardian's review, while calling the film chilling and significant, identified the anonymity as a genuine weakness: if nobody can be persuaded to attach a name and face to the testimony, its force as testimony is reduced — even though the reviewer acknowledged the danger involved in doing so.
The setting supplies more than secrecy. The camera drifts across gleaming apartment buildings and glimpses of prosperous life roughly 60km from Gaza.
The room on Thursday night
The premiere was an unusually emotional one by festival standards.
Jonathan Glazer, the Oscar-winning director of The Zone of Interest and an executive producer on the film, embraced Abraham and Szor and cheered them through the applause. Both directors appeared sombre and became tearful at points, as did members of the audience, some of whom held up Palestinian flags.
Abraham and Szor were two of the film-makers behind No Other Land, the documentary about Israeli military operations against Palestinian villages in the West Bank.
NAZA is executive produced by Glazer and James Wilson, and appears under the production auspices of the Guardian, which has already published some of the reporting it draws on.
A late entry
The film was not in the competition line-up announced in July. It was added a month later, and at a press conference on Thursday the directors explained the timing simply: they were still finishing it, after three years of work.
The late entry produced the defining event of the festival's final week.
What the film alleges
The substance behind the ovation is a set of claims about how targets are selected, and they are the interviewees' account as relayed in the film.
According to the Guardian's review, the officers describe intelligence work in which attack reconnaissance has been handed to software: a program is said to analyse the call patterns of phones belonging to known Hamas members, identify which among tens of thousands of other monitored phones show similar behaviour, and mark those owners for attack — usually at night, in homes whose locations are already documented.
One passage in the film mentions a permitted error rate of 15%. Another interviewee refers to an expected Naza figure of 20 for each action, though the review notes the number appears elastic.
Other sections deal with the logistics of operations in northern Gaza, with sniper attacks on civilians who had crossed into a militarised zone without knowing it, and with an intelligence unit described as unofficially loyal to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu personally, said to have worked against international human rights bodies.
These are allegations made by anonymous interviewees in a documentary. They have not been independently verified here, and the Israeli government has not responded to them in the material reviewed.
The Guardian's reviewer also pushed back on one element: a speaker's comparison to nazism, which the review calls specious and ahistorical, suggesting the bombing of Dresden as the more apt parallel.
What an ovation does and does not mean
Venice ovations are a genre of their own, and their length has become a form of currency that critics treat with some scepticism. A standing ovation is an audience's response in a room, and it measures the intensity of feeling among people who chose to attend a premiere.
It is not a verdict on the accuracy of what they watched. The allegations NAZA makes concern the conduct of a state's military and rest on anonymous testimony from 24 people whose identities the audience cannot check — a point the Guardian's own review raised while still judging the film important.
What the 24.5 minutes does establish is the film's position going into awards season, and the attention its claims will now receive. A documentary that was not on the line-up six weeks ago leaves Venice as the most talked-about title of the festival, made by Israeli directors, about Israeli intelligence, shot on Israeli rooftops.
