Vulture: Naza is one of the most important films of our time

Bilge Ebiri’s Vulture review was published on 10 September 2026. The fact he puts first is an end title: many revelations had already run in The Guardian, +972 Magazine and Local Call. At the press conference, he writes, Rachel Szor added that Palestinian journalists had reported the facts. He also says the film was a late addition to Venice and New York, which is why the secrecy made sense to him. Abraham and Szor are the Israeli half of the No Other Land team. The line he quotes is their obligation, as Israelis, to examine systems behind a mass killing they say their country is responsible for.

The screening he describes is simple. Abraham sits on Tel Aviv rooftops with 24 intelligence officers, faces hidden by night and voices modified. Ebiri defines NAZA as the number of other people who might be killed in a strike, and says the term does not sort women, children and the elderly into separate categories. Across the film he hears figures of 4, 15, 20 and 200, and one officer’s account of a building of 500 people destroyed to reach one target. Abraham asks one subject whether it is a genocide. Ebiri reports the answer as “Yes, absolutely.” Officers describe predictive software that flags people from patterns of behaviour, and one says there are not many military targets in Gaza but thousands of homes. Another compares the remote work to a video game and says that in training they were shown the film Eye in the Sky.

On the city, Ebiri writes that many residents of Gaza were displaced from Tel Aviv in the 1940s. One interviewee describes Rimal’s glass towers reduced to rubble, photo albums and schoolbooks left behind, and says, “We erased history.” Ebiri reports a claim that after 1967 Gazans were not allowed to build their own infrastructure, and that communications developed in the 1970s were then used to monitor the population. Interviewees describe hacking girls’ phones to time a father’s return. One recalls snipers firing on people waiting for food after supplies were blocked in the north. Another describes dogs on bodies. A further interviewee says he still believes the Nazis were evil and asks what that makes him. Peter Bradshaw’s Guardian review the same day rejects that parallel. This desk records both and adopts neither.

Ebiri’s argument is that the film matters because earlier witnesses were ignored. The National later quoted Abraham, on the prize stage, putting a number on Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza. That is a different sentence. Screenings are at https://nazafilm.org/showings, the watch page is https://nazafilm.org/watch, and the record is https://nazafilm.org/record/timeline.