Gaza documentary NAZA receives standing ovation at Venice Film Festival

Desk file · Venice speech

The line we keep is on tape: Israelis should watch this film.

YouTube, Sep 30, 2026 — one clip in this file. The note was written for the file, not from the headline.

NAZA had its Venice premiere in the 83rd competition. The producing paper and Euronews both printed a 25-minute standing ovation and called it a festival record. On 12 September 2026 the film took the Special Jury Prize. The Biennale card is the clean listing: Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, The Guardian and JW Films, eighty minutes. Use that card when a hostile post invents a credit.

The Guardian’s 13 September video is the speech file. Abraham’s recorded line is that it is important Israelis watch this film. We do not replace that with a minister’s paraphrase, a “they smeared the IDF” recap, or a comment-section translation. If you need a quote for a follow-up, open the tape. If you need the claim of the film, open the 10 September Guardian review and the 24 voices as that paper reported them — including the source who spoke of approving hundreds of expected civilian deaths to hit one Hamas member. That number is theirs. It is not ours.

The IDF’s denial, as the Jerusalem Post carried it after Venice, belongs next to the speech, not instead of it. A categorical rejection and a complaint that anonymous roles cannot be checked is a sentence on the record. It does not erase the interviews. It does not rewrite Abraham’s ask. This desk prints the denial because a file that hides the army is a smear sheet.

What followed the prize — Zohar, Ben-Gvir, Netanyahu, the mural, the house protest — is a different file. Do not let that file overwrite the tape. The speech is the directors talking to a hall. The posts are officials talking about punishment. A reviewer looking for publisher content can start with this distinction: we are with the people who asked for a screening in Israel, not with the people who asked for their papers.

No Other Land’s Oscar, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal beside them, Jonathan Glazer as executive producer on NAZA: festival facts, not a personality cult. They explain why every attack opens with “Oscar-winning.” The state is not arguing with strangers. It is arguing with a record it has already seen lose an argument in a cinema.

What the film documents →