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Euronews
Variety / festival press
NAZA breaks Venice standing-ovation record
Written by Euronews
Briefing from Euronews. Original reporting stays with the outlet.
The premiere drew a reported 24.5-minute ovation, the longest recorded at the festival. The film is the only documentary in the 2026 main competition.
David Mouriquand’s Euronews culture report, published on 11 September 2026, says NAZA premiered the day before and drew a standing ovation of 24.5 minutes, which Euronews calls the longest recorded at the Venice Film Festival. The previous mark, in that account, was 22 minutes for Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab, a Gaza-set film that had premiered at Venice the year before. Euronews also says NAZA was the only documentary in the 2026 main competition, that it runs 80 minutes, and that it was shot in secrecy at night on Tel Aviv rooftops during the Gaza war. The people on camera are described as 24 Israeli military intelligence officers, soldiers and whistleblowers.
The title, Euronews writes, is a military acronym used for the number of civilians expected to be killed in an airstrike. It stands for “Nezek Agavi,” collateral damage. The report says the film builds on reporting published between 2023 and 2025 by +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, and The Guardian. At the press conference, Abraham’s principal request to the officers and soldiers, as Euronews quotes him, was that they describe what they did, in detail, and sketch how it worked. Euronews also carries a line he gave Variety: as Israelis, he and Szor used their access to people in their own society who had gone into the military to look at that system as it carried out what he said all human rights organisations are calling a genocide.
Euronews says NAZA is produced by The Guardian and by James Wilson and Jonathan Glazer, the team behind The Zone of Interest. It says the film would screen at San Sebastián on 23 September and at the New York Film Festival on 26 September. As of that writing there was no theatrical date, and MK2 Films was handling world sales. With Venice ending the next day, Euronews asked whether NAZA would become only the third documentary to win the Golden Lion, after Sacro GRA and All the Beauty and the Bloodshed. That award, it noted, was due on Saturday 12 September.
That Saturday the Guardian’s press office reported the Special Jury Prize, not the Golden Lion. The Guardian’s citizenship story later called the ovation 25 minutes and a festival record, so the two outlets do not print the same clock. This desk keeps each figure with the outlet that printed it. Euronews also identifies No Other Land as their 2024 documentary about settler violence in the West Bank, and as the Oscar winner for best documentary. The ovation is on https://nazafilm.org/record/timeline. The festival dates are the kind of public listing kept at https://nazafilm.org/showings. How to watch the film is at https://nazafilm.org/watch.
This desk
Desk file · Venice speech
The line we keep is on tape: Israelis should watch this film.
Euronews, Sep 11, 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.
Unofficial. We support Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. We do not reprint the outlet and we do not invent a donation page.
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