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“NAZA,” the hot-button documentary about the war in Gaza which recently won a special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival, beat “Avengers: Endgame Encore” to debut at No. 1 at the Italian box office.
In its first
theatrical outing following its Venice launch, the doc — which was shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv and explores the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza — grossed roughly €1.1 million ($1.2 million) on Monday and Tuesday, blowing away the Marvel franchise re-release that’s in its second week at Italian cinemas. “Avengers: Endgame Encore,” during the same two-day period this week, pulled €356,000 ($404,000) in Italy.
The Italian release of “NAZA” via I Wonder Pictures was originally planned as a three-day event running Sept. 28-30. But the strong response in terms of advance ticket sales and initial screenings has led to its run being extended beyond the originally scheduled dates. Numerous screenings were already sold out prior to the doc’s premiere.
“NAZA,” which was helmed by Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — two of the four co-directors of 2025’s Oscar-winning doc “No Other Land” — earned a massive 24.5-minute ovation at Venice and was also very well-received when it bowed in North America last week at the New York Film Festival.
“NAZA” will soon be released theatrically in more than 50 territories and will subsequently be made visible to global audiences for free via The Guardian website in late November.
As previously announced, “NAZA” has set a distribution rollout for U.S. theaters starting Wednesday via an innovative plan that forgoes selling the film to a studio or independent distributor.
The U.S. rollout, which kicks off exclusively at the IFC Center in New York City, is “spearheaded by British newspaper The Guardian and MK2, who have assembled a team of U.S. and international partners and consultants to bring the film to audiences as quickly as possible,” according to a statement.
“NAZA” builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972, Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and The Guardian between 2023 and 2025. The doc is produced by The Guardian and JW Films, with Jonathan Glazer serving as executive producer and French sales company MK2 handling international distribution.
Directors Abraham and Szor issued the following statement when its global distribution plan was announced last week: “We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli filmmakers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible. While filming members of Israel’s military on rooftops at night in Tel Aviv over the past three years, we found ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents’ generation and throughout the 20th century: how does one group of people allow the total dehumanization of another? What do the inner workings of such a system look like? Many of the revelations in the film were published almost immediately as we learned of them, in the months following the October 7th attacks, by The Guardian (one of ‘NAZA’s’ producers), in collaboration with reporting partners +972 Magazine and Local Call. The film lets us explore something deeper than we could in our investigative journalism alone: not only the words being said but also those that are not said, the silence. It is up to all of us to break that silence.”
