“NAZA”: Gaza Out of Frame

Added at the last minute to complete the twenty-one titles in competition, NAZA arrives at the Venice Film Festival as the only documentary in competition and as confirmation of a direction the festival can no longer — and no longer wishes to — conceal: after The Voice of Hind Rajab by Kaouther Ben Hania received a standing ovation lasting more than twenty minutes and the Silver Lion last year, Venice once again places the Palestinian genocide at the centre of its programme, this time without the mediation of fiction.

The production itself already says much about the project: it is directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four filmmakers behind the 2025 Oscar winner No Other Land; produced by The Guardian — whose investigations into AI-assisted target designation systems provided the film’s starting point — together with James Wilson; and executive produced by Jonathan Glazer. The Wilson-Glazer partnership comes from The Zone of Interest, and that connection is not merely promotional: it provides the formal key to these eighty minutes.

Because NAZA is, above all, a work about the act of looking. Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, it records the testimony of twenty-four officers and soldiers from Israeli military intelligence — their faces and voices digitally altered, following three years of patient and risky investigation — while the camera turns towards the urban horizon: illuminated windows, family dinners, the eight o’clock news transformed into a national ritual.

The homes of Israel’s bourgeoisie, filmed from an almost surveillance-like distance, function as a silent reverse shot to the account of the bombardments carried out in Gaza since 7 October 2023, though they had begun years earlier. Glazer once articulated his ethics of representation by saying that victims could remain outside the frame, but never outside our consciousness; here the procedure is reversed and sharpened: Gaza is present precisely through its absence — a moral absence too — sixty kilometres away from an illuminated building where someone prepares its destruction (the IDF headquarters), or where families simply go about their everyday lives.

Directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. © David Levene The Guardian.

The structure follows that decision. Abraham and Szor dispense with the talking-head format and organise the material as a dialogue, with long silences that weigh as heavily as the answers. The darkness, which in the film is both a condition of safety and of candour—things are said in the dark that would not be said in the light—is sustained by a soundtrack of barely audible low frequencies (credited to Mica Levi and Rudi Zygadlo, composers of the scores for Glazer’s last two films, Under the Skin and The Zone of Interest) that underline nothing and make everything more unsettling.

What we hear, meanwhile, has a chilling administrative coldness. The interviewees describe chains of command in which the selection of targets is delegated to algorithmic systems, with margins of “collateral damage” predetermined by senior commanders: NAZA is precisely the acronym used by Israeli intelligence to calculate how many civilians it expects to kill in each attack. Civilians monitored for years, whose actual connection to Hamas often proves impossible to establish, become figures authorised in advance, eliminated without anyone’s voice trembling as they recount it.

The most disturbing device is the decision to ask those officers to draw by hand, on paper, the high-tech systems they operated: in those crude diagrams, the executioner’s gaze is laid bare. And the film does not stop there, as it also points to the persecution of those who reported the crimes to the International Criminal Court, closing the circle between the machinery of killing and the machinery designed to prevent it from being judged.

None of this is presented as a drama of conscience. NAZA deliberately disregards the guilt, pride or remorse of its sources, and that refusal proves to be a strength: by declining to cushion their testimonies with psychological depth, the film leaves them exposed for what they are—procedures described by those who carried them out.

Objectivity does not cool the material; it makes it infinitely more horrific, particularly in the shocking ending, confronted with mobile-phone footage of collapsed buildings in Gaza and their victims beneath the rubble. It restores the centre of gravity to where it should be: not with those who killed, but with those who were killed.