NAZA Gaza AI Documentary Earns Record Venice Ovation

The 80-minute documentary investigates the Israeli military’s AI-assisted targeting systems in Gaza through testimonies from 24 intelligence insiders.

Venice Premiere Breaks Festival Standing Ovation Records

The Venice Film Festival crowd delivered an unprecedented 24-and-a-half-minute standing ovation following the world premiere of NAZA on Thursday, making it the longest-ever standing ovation at the event. The reception surpassed the 22-minute ovation given last year to Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, which tells the story of the six-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli forces in Gaza in January 2024 (alternatively noted in reporting as a 23-minute ovation for the docudrama about the killing of a five-year-old Palestinian girl by Israeli forces). That prior reception was believed to have set a festival record at the time.

As Naza directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor walked the red carpet in rainy Venice, people in the crowd could be heard chanting Free Palestine! and “Free Israel!”. Visibly emotional and growing teary-eyed during the applause, the directors were embraced by the film’s executive producer, The Zone of Interest director, Jonathan Glazer, while audience members held up Palestinian flags inside the venue.

Testimonies From 24 Military Insiders on AI Targeting Systems

The result of a nearly three-year investigation, NAZA features extensive testimony from 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers involved in the surveillance and remote killing of Palestinian civilians. To protect their identities because of the risks involved in speaking publicly about Israel’s war activities, the interviews were filmed at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv on the condition of anonymity, with the appearance and voices of participants digitally altered.

NAZA Gaza AI Documentary Earns Record Venice Ovation — Photo: bgnes.com

The documentary explores secret methods and automated tools, including an AI-assisted system known as “Lavender”, which drew on Gaza’s monitored telecommunications network—phone calls, movements, and interactions—to identify assassination targets. Interviewees detail how the Israeli military hacked into phones to identify the location of such targets, and covertly listened into conversations with their wives and children moments before they were all killed in homes bombed at night. One interviewee says in the film, It was done on a mass scale, like a factory, while another involved in identifying targets states that the process is like a video game.

Origins of the Title and the Bureaucracy of Collateral Damage

The film takes its title from a Hebrew intelligence euphemism and acronym used to indicate the number of civilians expected to be killed—or civilian collateral damage—in a given air strike. Like Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest, NAZA is mainly focused on the bureaucratic machinery that allows mass killing to become routine, examining a system of calculations, procedures, and euphemisms.

The documentary was shown at the Venice international film festival on Thursday as the only documentary competing for its prestigious Golden Lion award. The project builds on reporting between 2023 and 2025 published by the Israeli-Palestinian +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, and The Guardian, and is produced by the Guardian.

“We felt that there is still some sort of importance to take those testimonies and put it in a film,” Szor said. “It’s different to hear, actually, the people who designed and operated those systems talk about it in front of a camera, and sketch it, show it.”

Creative Team and Collaborative Precedents

NAZA was directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. Abraham and Szor previously won an Oscar in 2025 for No Other Land, a documentary on Israeli settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank, made with Palestinian co-directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal.