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“NAZA,” the new documentary from Israeli “No Other Land” directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, earned a massive 24.5-minute ovation at its Venice Film Festival premiere on Thursday.
This marks the longest-ever standing
ovation in Venice — besting the 22 minutes for “The Voice of Hind Rajab” last year — and seemingly the longest at a major film festival, period.
Oscar-winning “Zone of Interest” director Jonathan Glazer, who is an executive producer on the film, embraced Abraham and Szor and cheered them on throughout the astounding applause. The directing duo both got teary-eyed at points, as did the audience, some of whom held up Palestinian flags.
“NAZA” shows “in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” according to its official synopsis. The hot-button doc, which was shot in secrecy at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, features revelatory interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers. “NAZA,” a term that appears throughout the documentary, is an acronym for collateral damage used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians it expects will be killed in an airstrike.
The doc was a late addition to Venice’s competition, being added a month after the initial lineup was announced in July. The directors explained at a press conference earlier on Thursday that the last-minute nature was because they were finishing the movie, which they worked on for three years.
Abraham and Szor were two of the four directors of “No Other Land,” which won the 2025 best documentary Oscar and depicts the Israeli government’s efforts to force Palestinians from their homes in the southern West Bank.
In an interview with Varietyahead of the doc’s premiere, Abraham said: “As Israelis, we found ourselves wanting to use the kind of position that we have — the access that we have to people in our own society who went into the military — to look at that system as it carried out what all human rights organizations are saying is a genocide.”
The film, which is the only documentary feature in this year’s Venice’s competition lineup, is produced by British newspaper The Guardian and James Wilson (JW Films) and executive produced by Glazer. Wilson and Glazer are the Oscar-winning team behind the film “The Zone of Interest.”
Last year, Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania’s Gaza-set “The Voice of Hind Rajab,” about the death of a 6-year-old girl killed by Israeli military fire while attempting to flee Gaza City with her family, elicited a 22-minute standing ovation, which stands as the fest’s longest. Ben Hania is part of Venice’s Maggie Gyllenhaal-led jury that will be selecting the award winners on Saturday.
