Official Venice listing: NAZA

La Biennale di Venezia lists NAZA in the Venezia 83 competition, on the main slate rather than in a sidebar strand. The page names Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor as directors and gives the running time as 80 minutes, the languages as Hebrew and English, and the country as the United Kingdom. Production is credited to The Guardian and to JW Films, with Jim Wilson named beside that company. World sales are credited to mk2. Those lines are the festival’s own dossier, the record later applause and later political attacks were answering.

The synopsis says the film was shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv and, in the festival’s words, reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. The directors’ statement published on the same page says they made the film out of an obligation to use their position as Israelis to examine the systems behind that killing, which they say their country is responsible for. They write that three years of filming kept returning them to questions they associate with an earlier generation: how one group of people allows the total dehumanisation of another, and what the inner workings of such a system look like. They say many of the revelations were published almost as soon as they learned them, in the months after the 7 October attacks, by The Guardian — one of the producers — together with +972 Magazine and Local Call.

The statement draws a line between that reporting and the film. Journalism, they write, carried the words. The film is where they look at what is not said. They put the difference in one line: the work explores “not only the words being said but also those that are not said, the silence.” The listing does not clock an ovation and does not announce a prize.

Euronews, writing the next day, timed the premiere applause and named the San Sebastián and New York festival dates that were then on the calendar. The Guardian’s press office, two days after this listing, confirmed the Special Jury Prize. The public sequence is kept at https://nazafilm.org/record/timeline. Screenings this desk has been able to tie to a public listing are at https://nazafilm.org/showings. Where to watch the film, including the Guardian review’s later note that it would be free on the Guardian’s website from late November with no day named, is at https://nazafilm.org/watch. The competition listing is the start of that chain, and the original page remains La Biennale’s.