Gaza documentary to premiere at Venice film festival

A new documentary called “NAZA” from the same directors as the Oscar-winning Israeli-Palestinian production “No Other Land” will premiere at the Venice Film Festival next month, organisers said on Monday.

The film, which will be in competition for the Golden Lion award, is about “the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” according to a synopsis published on the film festival website.

The film is directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four co-directors of “No Other Land”, which tells the story of Palestinian activists trying to protect a cluster of villages in the occupied West Bank from demolition by the Israeli military.

NAZA is produced by The Guardian and James Wilson (JW Films) and executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer. Wilson and Glazer are the team behind the Oscar-winning film “The Zone of Interest” set in Auschwitz concentration camp.

The Guardian said NAZA is “an Israeli military acronym used euphemistically by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that it expects will be killed in an airstrike”.

The film will be screened on September 10 in the presence of the directors, the producers, Guardian journalists and the official delegation.

It is the only documentary among the 21 films competing for the Golden Lion Award at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival.

Palestinian militant group Hamas launched an attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, which resulted in the deaths of 1,221 people, according to an AFP tally based on official Israeli figures. Militants also took 251 hostages to Gaza.

Israel’s retaliatory military campaign in Gaza has killed more than 73,000 people, according to the territory’s health ministry, which operates under Hamas authority and whose figures are considered reliable by the United Nations.

A ceasefire took hold in October but progress on permanently ending the war has stalled, and Israeli forces currently control nearly 70 percent of the territory.

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