Venice festival ends with Gaza documentary’s Golden Lion chances in focus

"NAZA," a documentary by Oscar-winning Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor about Israel's AI-assisted targeting of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, premiered on September 10 at the 83rd Venice Film Festival to a record-breaking standing ovation that lasted roughly 25 minutes, the longest in the festival's history.deadline+2

The film has drawn fierce pushback from the Israeli military and political figures, with the Israel Defense Forces on Friday saying it "categorically rejects" the documentary's allegations and former Prime Minister Naftali Bennett calling the film a "blood libel" against Israel.timesofisrael

Inside the "Killing Factory"

Shot covertly on Tel Aviv rooftops over nearly three years, the 80-minute documentary features 24 Israeli military and intelligence whistleblowers whose faces and voices have been digitally altered. The interviewees describe an AI-powered system known as "Lavender" that drew on mass surveillance of Gaza's telecommunications network to identify targets based on phone calls, movements and social interactions.prothomalo+3

"It was done on a mass scale, like a factory," one interviewee says in the film. Another describes the remote killing process as "insanely fun," likening it to a video game. The title derives from a Hebrew military acronym for the number of civilians expected to die in a planned airstrike — what amounts to a pre-approved civilian casualty threshold.middleeastmonitor+2

Abraham told the Associated Press that the filmmakers' approach was straightforward: "We simply asked these officers and soldiers to recount their experiences". The documentary builds on earlier investigations published by +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call, and The Guardian.timesofisrael+3

Israel's Response

The IDF challenged the film's reliance on anonymous sources, stating that the whistleblowers' identities "cannot be verified," including whether they served in the military or in what capacity. The military maintained that all strike decisions were made "by human personnel only… and not by artificial intelligence," and that it targets "terrorist organizations, foremost among them Hamas, in accordance with international law".timesofisrael

Bennett, posting on X on September 11, wrote: "If Israel wanted to hurt the people of Gaza, we would not send our sons and daughters to fight house to house, through alleyways and tunnels, at the terrible cost of our own soldiers being killed and wounded".timesofisrael

Venice and Beyond

"NAZA" was a late addition to the festival's main competition, added on August 23 after producers completed the anonymization of their sources. It was the only documentary competing for the Golden Lion at this year's festival, which concludes Saturday with the announcement of jury prizes led by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Abraham and Szor, along with Palestinian co-directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2025 for "No Other Land," about Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank.labiennale+3

The film's North American premiere is set for the 2026 New York Film Festival, which runs from September 25 to October 12.wikipedia