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For 75 of the 80 minutes of Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s NAZA, we are in the dark. Only literally, for the words we hear spoken from the dimly lit rooftops of Tel Aviv could not be any clearer. They come from the mouths of former IDF soldiers, whose faces are obscured by night and whose voices are digitally modified to“protect confidential journalistic sources”. We learn the meaning of the film’s title early on: NAZA is the acronym used by Israeli army forces to indicate possible civilian casualties of a planned strike. By the time I write this, the number of Palestinians killed by Israeli attacks sits at over 76,000. This number continues to rise daily.
This visual choice stands in direct opposition to the almost blinding clarity of the duo’s previous film No Other Land, directed alongside Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, which documented the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film in 2025. It’s interesting to observe the path taken by the two Israeli directors when working separately from their two Palestinian collaborators – NAZA continues Abraham and Szor’s difficult work of confronting the horrors committed by their government and people, and the weight of that process is never clearer than in Abraham’s heavy pauses before posing questions such as:“Why did you kill them?” The answer he receives offers no closure:“I don’t know.”
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NAZA is both formally and narratively informed by the work of Jonathan Glazer and Laura Poitras, the former an executive producer and the latter an advisor to Abraham and Szor’s film. From Glazer, the directors borrow the guiding thread of The Zone of Interest: the idea that the victims of great barbarity remain hauntingly present even if the camera lingers only on the perpetrators. As for Poitras, the directors enter into dialogue with her repeated dissection of the difference between journalism and documentary – NAZA being a direct response to Poitras’s concept of“journalism plus.”
The documentarian coined the expression while on the festival trail for Citizenfour, labelling journalism and filmmaking as“additive.”“It’s about what we communicate with images, beyond words,” she said back in 2014. While Abraham and Szor find success in mirroring Glazer’s thesis, NAZA is less dextrous in navigating Poitras’s. The duo tries to untangle their film from the more regimented structures of the written work they conducted over the last three years for vehicles such as The Guardian and +972 Magazine (or Local Call), somewhat stumbling on their way to elucidate the reasoning behind making NAZA a documentary instead of reportage.
The film is never more effective than when it makes that distinction clear. The bright marquee of the Tel Aviv Cinematheque displays an upcoming season dedicated to the work of Claude Lanzmann as we hear a soldier compare their slaughtering of Palestinians to that of Jews during the Holocaust; high-ranking officials delineate their regimented mechanisms for ethnic cleansing as the filmmakers cut to archival footage of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu defining terrorism in a television appearance to promote his book‘Terrorism: How the West Can Win’ four decades ago:“The deliberate and systematic murder, maiming, and menacing of the innocent to inspire fear for political ends,” he says, mirroring the very orders he has given to the IDF.
These punctuated moments, and the pointed silence that briefly follows them, are vital in allowing the flood of information presented in NAZA to sink in. Prodded by Abraham’s incisive questions, high-ranking officers relay how artificial intelligence programs designed for finding Hamas have helped the human beings tasked with the assassinations of thousands to wash their hands of the guilt of final orders; a technician recalls hearing a three-year-old girl burn alive in the same surveillance line that led him to authorise a strike on her house; a soldier confesses to averting his gaze from the screen as dogs gnawed on dead bodies left in ditches. There is no music as the words are said, only the screeching of wet marker tips scribbling on white paper as the witnesses sketch the mundane layout of security systems responsible for the genocide of Palestinian people.
By the time light finally floods the screen, it brings no solace. Abraham and Szor wait until the final minutes of their film to introduce images of the horrifying consequences of the actions taken – and orders followed – by the obscured men they sat across from on those rooftops. A teddy bear peeks from rubble as a father cries for his son, Sa’id. A little boy, made NAZA, too.
