Israeli film on Gaza receives 25-minute ovation at Venice premiere
Venice Film Festival honours NAZA, an expose on Israel's use of AI systems in Gaza.
A film documenting Israel’s use of AI-powered systems to target Palestinians in Gaza has received a 25-minute standing ovation at its premiere at the Venice Film Festival.
The 80-minute film, NAZA, was directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who won an Oscar in 2025 for No Other Land, a documentary on Israeli settler pogroms in the occupied West Bank, made with Palestinian co-directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal.
The result of a nearly three-year investigation, the film is built on testimony from Israeli military and intelligence sources who spoke on the condition that their identities be concealed. Their voices and faces were digitally altered, and they were filmed at night on Tel Aviv rooftops.
“There can be no denying what intelligence personnel knew”, military sources in the film revealed, adding that they “witnessed with their own eyes and ears that the homes they were ‘incriminating’ were filled with families”.