Screen Daily: an urgent gut-punch from the No Other Land directors

Lee Marshall’s Screen Daily review, dated 10 September 2026, calls NAZA an 80-minute British film in Venice competition, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four directors of the 2025 Oscar winner No Other Land. Jonathan Glazer is the executive producer. Marshall’s point about form is that the film is built as cinema rather than as a stack of news items. The interviews happen at night, on two facing chairs or on the parapet of a Tel Aviv roof. A caption, he writes, says 24 Israel Defense Forces operatives were interviewed, all involved in the surveillance and killing of civilians in Gaza, and that their appearances and voices were digitally altered. Abraham conducts the interviews. Marshall says the questions go after facts more often than feelings.

Most of what the officers say, he writes, had already been published by The Guardian, which produced the film with Jim Wilson’s JW Films, or by +972 Magazine and Local Call. Hearing it spoken is the difference he marks. He quotes one interviewee saying most people in the unit are left-wing, and another saying it is better to give monitoring and identification to artificial intelligence than to someone whose friend was killed by Hamas. Another calls the work a video game. The chapter titles he prints are “Where’s Daddy?”, “Annihilation Zone” and “Bibi’s Department.” One operative, in Marshall’s account, tracked two young sisters in order to learn when their father would be home, then found after the strike — which killed the girls and the rest of the family — that the father was not there. An air-raid siren cuts the calm once. Gaza appears only in a brief final section.

The credits at the foot of the review name producers Harry Davies, Lindsay Poulton and James Wilson, and list cinematography as “Anonymous” and Rachel Szor. International sales are mk2. Marshall’s commercial note is about the United States. No Other Land, he writes, was self-distributed there, and NAZA could meet the same hurdle before any streaming deal. He also reports a biographical fact he says the film itself does not state: Abraham was selected for the Intelligence Corps and left after a week’s training on conscientious grounds. A later Ynet profile gives a different length of service in its text and again in a caption. This page keeps Screen Daily’s sentence as Screen Daily’s, including the warning that the film does not say it.

The review is the trade description of how the premiere film is built. The directors’ own statement about silence is on the Biennale listing. The prize came two days later. Public screenings are at https://nazafilm.org/showings, the watch page is https://nazafilm.org/watch, and the dated public record is https://nazafilm.org/record/timeline.