A tiny audience, a giant backlash
Some documentaries spend months hunting for attention. NAZA has found an argument first.
The film comes from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, both part of the Oscar-winning team behind No Other Land, so it arrived with more name recognition than most festival documentaries ever get. That alone would’ve been enough to draw a crowd of critics and programmers. The subject matter did the rest. Even before most people could see it, the movie had already started picking up heat.
So far, the audience has stayed small by any normal standard. Between its festival stops in Venice and New York, NAZA has only played to a few thousand viewers. For a documentary, that’s a modest run. And it works. For a film now sitting in the middle of a political fight, it’s almost funny. A title can be barely seen and still set off a full-scale reaction. This one has managed exactly that, which says something about the current mix of tech news, digital culture and power and politics. In other words, you don’t need a wide release to trigger a loud mess.
A small festival run can still trigger a very big fight when the film lands in the middle of war, surveillance, and identity politics.
The timing matters. NAZA is arriving while the Gaza war remains raw, while arguments over Israeli military conduct are still escalating and while documentaries about the conflict get treated less like films and more like evidence files. That puts the movie in an awkward spot. People are reacting to it before they’ve had a fair chance to watch it, which is hardly a new phenomenon, but it feels sharper here because the film comes with a built-in pedigree and a built-in controversy. If you make a film with Oscar winners from a previous project and then point it at one of the most charged topics on earth, you can expect a little noise. A little, in this case, turned into a lot.
The reactions have split fast. Some people are treating the film as a serious journalistic intervention. Others are already trying to swat it down as suspect, biased, or incomplete before it reaches a broader audience. That kind of preemptive judgment’s familiar enough in digital culture, where clips travel faster than context and outrage tends to travel faster than both. What makes this case different is that the film’s barely started its public life. It hasn’t had the ordinary cushion of wide release, word of mouth, or a few patient reviews to settle the conversation. It’s had festival screenings and then a pile of strong opinions.
That’s the odd shape of the moment. NAZA is still a small documentary in the practical sense. Simple as that. In the public sense, it’s already a bigger fight than many studio releases ever become. And that tension, between a limited audience and a very loud response, is where the story starts.
What NAZA says about modern war
After being added to the 83rd Venice Film Festival program, and then slotted into the festival’s screening schedule, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s NAZA documentary turns the machinery of war into the movie’s real subject. The film is built around rooftop interviews with roughly two dozen former Israeli military and intelligence personnel. They aren’t shown in full. Their faces are reduced to silhouettes, and their voices are altered, so the testimony lands somewhere between witness statement and protected confession. That choice gives the film a stripped-down look, but the material itself is anything but sparse.
In the film’s account, the war isn’t driven only by battlefield sightings or old-fashioned intelligence files. It’s filtered through software, automated flags, and target lists that grow out of surveillance data. One of the central claims concerns an AI system called Lavender, which the documentary says was used to identify suspected Hamas members at scale. The film also describes a practice of monitoring family phones, then checking whether a target’s relatives are nearby before a strike goes ahead. The picture that emerges is less about a single operator making a split-second decision and more about a chain of digital sorting, where a person can become a target because a system has marked them as one.
The unnerving part is not that war uses technology. It’s that the technology sounds organized enough to make mass harm feel administratively tidy.
That’s where the film’s most jarring claim comes in. NAZA says the military doesn’t simply ask whether a strike can hit its intended target. It also calculates how many civilians are likely to die if the strike’s carried out. Those expected deaths are then treated as part of the decision, not a reason to stop the operation. In the film’s telling, there’s a threshold for what counts as an acceptable level of civilian loss, and that threshold shifted sharply after October 7. Before the attacks, the ceiling was lower. Afterward, the film says it moved into the low twenties for many strikes, with at least one case climbing into the hundreds.
That detail’s grim on its face, but the broader logic’s even harder to shake. If a strike planner can accept a certain number of dead civilians as the price of one suspected militant, then the math stops being an abstract military sidebar and becomes a daily sorting exercise. The film keeps returning to that idea: the civilian count is not collateral in the background, but part of the calculation up front. It’s the sort of thing that makes the documentary read like tech news as much as war reporting. The software matters, and the thresholds matter. And the database matters. So does the language used to describe all three.
What gives the film its bleakest edge is the size of the target pool it describes. If thousands of suspected fighters, commanders and associates can be placed into a system that tracks them through phones, homes, relatives and routines, then the question is no longer whether any single strike is justified. It’s what happens when the list keeps producing more names than anyone can safely absorb. NAZA suggests that the combined toll could spread across Gaza so widely that the damage stops looking outstanding at all. That’s a horrible sentence to finish, but the film seems determined to sit with it.
The film’s rooftop witnesses, with their hidden faces and flattened voices, make that argument feel clinical instead of theatrical. They speak like people who know the inside of a system and have spent time deciding how much to say out loud. Abraham and Szor don’t frame them as heroes or villains. They’re presented as operators, analysts, and former insiders describing a process that can be repeated, audited, and scaled. That last word does a lot of work here. Scale’s usually a product pitch term. In NAZA, it becomes something uglier: a way to process more targets, more phone checks, more strikes, more deaths.
The result is a documentary that treats modern war as an information problem with a body count attached. It doesn’t stay in speeches, flags, or battlefield speeches designed for cameras. The permissions, the phone traces, and the strike thresholds, it hangs around the software logic. That’s a colder story, and a harder one to shrug off.
Why the film is setting off alarms on every side
The friction around NAZA started before most people had a chance to see it in full. After its production announcement, the film drew the kind of online response that usually arrives when a documentary touches war, surveillance, and Israeli politics all at once. Some people went straight at the filmmakers, arguing that the movie trims away context, leaves out details they consider essential, or presents a one-sided account dressed up as investigation. Others reacted with the kind of snide certainty that lives comfortably on social media and in a few corners of the press, where the goal seems less like correction than dismissal. The film’s path through the Venezia 83 competition slate only widened the noise.
A documentary built on anonymity can be rigorous and vulnerable at the same time. That tension is exactly where the backlash finds room to grow.
At the New York Film Festival screening, the pushback turned public and noisy. Protesters reportedly held footage from the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and accused the film of ignoring “all the facts,” a phrase that says less about the film than about how many people now approach any conflict documentary with a readymade verdict. That kind of reaction is hard to separate from the wider political temperature around Israeli documentary work, especially when the subject’s Gaza and the filmmakers are already known for No Other Land, a movie that made them familiar names far beyond festival circuits. In this case, the anger does not come only from one side of the argument. It arrives from several directions at once, which is usually a sign that the film’s hit a nerve rather than simply earned attention.
In Israel, the backlash moved out of comment sections and into the street. Demonstrators targeted Rachel Szor’s family home, calls for punishment circulated, and Benjamin Netanyahu threatened to push laws that could strip citizenship in response to the film’s claims. That escalation matters because it shows how quickly a documentary can stop being treated as art or reporting and start getting handled like a political offense. Once that happens, the argument stops being about editing choices and starts looking a lot more like a loyalty test, which is never a healthy sign for public debate. The film’s own account of the secret systems used in Gaza has only sharpened the sense that the stakes are personal as well as political.
Then there’s the criticism coming from the opposite side, which is more complicated than a simple pro-Israel versus pro-Palestinian split. Some viewers have argued that NAZA centers Israeli voices once again, even if those voices are critical ones, while Palestinian testimony has already been streaming across screens, phones and social feeds for years. That objection lands differently because it does not try to disprove the film’s claims. It questions the choice of lens. Why listen yet again to Israeli veterans, even skeptical ones, when Palestinians have been narrating the human cost of the war in public for months? It’s a fair challenge, and one that sits awkwardly beside the film’s attempt to expose how Israeli military systems think.
The verification problem makes all of this harder. Abraham and Szor built the film around anonymous subjects, with no visible identities and altered voices, which protects the speakers but also limits what a viewer can test for themselves. In print, a reporter can point readers toward documents, dates, and named witnesses, then let them pull on the thread. On screen, the evidence’s arranged differently. A face turned into a silhouette’s dramatic, yes, but it also removes the small cues that help audiences judge who’s speaking and why. That doesn’t make the film false. It does make outside fact-checking slower and messier than it’d be in Abraham’s journalism, where claims can be cross-checked in a way that documentary form simply doesn’t allow as easily.
That gap between protection and proof’s where the argument keeps splitting. To supporters, anonymity is the only sane way to get insiders to talk. It creates a shield too convenient to trust, to detractors. And hovering over both positions is the uncomfortable reality that the film’s asking viewers to weigh testimony about AI surveillance Gaza and Lavender AI without the usual visual comforts of conventional documentary reporting. That’s a hard ask, which may be exactly why the film keeps drawing fire before most audiences have even had time to make up their own minds.
Why the rollout matters beyond the outrage
The noise around NAZA could easily make it look like another festival skirmish that burns hot for a weekend and then gets buried under the next argument. That’d miss the way the film’s being released, and what that says about the project. Yuval Abraham says more than 100 people fed the reporting that went into the film, yet fewer than 25 agreed to appear on camera. That gap matters. It means the movie was built from a much larger body of testimony than the screen can fully hold, with most contributors choosing not to be visible. In other words, the finished film’s not the whole report. It’s a compressed version of it.
A documentary can survive boos and walkouts; the harder test is whether it still travels once the festival crowd goes home.
The rollout itself is unusually clear. NAZA opens in New York first, then moves to Los Angeles and other cities shortly after. That’s a standard theatrical pattern on paper, but here it does something more interesting. It takes a film that’s already been treated like a live wire and places it into ordinary moviegoing, where viewers won’t be arriving with press passes, protest signs, or a preloaded argument. They’ll just be sitting in a theater with the thing itself. That shift from festival chatter to public release often changes the conversation fast. A film that feels like a political object in one room can feel like a journalistic record in another.
Still, the later plan to make it free to stream on the Guardian’s website pushes that idea even further. At that point, NAZA stops being just a ticketed film and becomes part of Abraham’s wider reporting life. Readers who know his print work will be able to compare the written investigation with the film version, which uses faces in silhouette, scrambled voices and tightly controlled testimony to make the same claims in a different form. That matters because it invites a different kind of scrutiny. You can read a paragraph twice. But the structure of the evidence changes when it moves from page to screen, you can pause a film, too.
Seen that way, NAZA feels less like a one-off eruption and more like a companion piece to No Other Land. The earlier film dealt with land theft, displacement and the daily grind of occupation on the ground. This new one is colder and more mechanized. It looks at software, surveillance, target selection, and the way military choices can be filtered through screens and thresholds. Same conflict, different machinery. And the mood’s different too, same region, different machinery. Where No Other Land had the texture of lived-in place, NAZA is full of hidden identities, technical language and decisions made at a remove. The collateral damage’s less a tragic accident than a line item in a process people are still arguing over.
That’s probably why the film’s unresolved questions don’t feel like a flaw so much as part of the design. Abraham and Szor aren’t pretending to close the book. They’re leaving gaps where they exist, and in a story this contested, that may be the only honest move. If audiences walk out with more unease than certainty, the movie has done something a neat verdict never could.
