Gaza Documentary 'Naza' Earns Historic 25-Minute Standing Ovation at Venice Film Festival

Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor earned a record-breaking standing ovation at the Venice Film Festival for their new documentary, Naza, which examines how Israel has selected targets for air strikes in Gaza.

The film received an ovation lasting about 24 and a half minutes following its premiere on Thursday, marking what is reportedly the longest in the festival's history. It surpasses the 23-minute, 50-second reception given to Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania's Gaza-set drama The Voice of Hind Rajab at Venice last year.

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, who are among the four directors of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, appeared emotional during the applause, while members of the audience held up Palestinian flags. Jonathan Glazer, director of the Oscar-winning The Zone of Interest and an executive producer on Naza, was also at the premiere and embraced the filmmakers following the screening.

The 80-minute documentary is the result of an investigation spanning almost three years, and features interviews with 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers about the systems used to identify targets in Gaza. The interviews were conducted in secrecy, with participants filmed at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv, and their faces and voices digitally altered to conceal their identities.

“We are letting the soldiers and the officers speak about what they did,” Yuval Abraham told AFP ahead of the premiere. “The goal was very simple: we wanted to hear, in as much detail as possible, how the systems of killing in Gaza looked, how they operated.”

The film takes its title from a term used by Israeli intelligence to refer to collateral damage, indicating the number of civilians expected to be killed in an air strike. Among the systems examined in the documentary is an AI-assisted programme known as Lavender, which has reportedly been used to identify potential targets using information gathered through surveillance of Gaza's telecommunications network.

Interviewees in the film describe how technology allowed targets to be identified and attacked on a large scale. “It was done on a mass scale, like a factory,” one interviewee says. Another describes the remote nature of the process as being “like a video game”.

Yuval Abraham said the filmmakers were able to gain access to military and intelligence sources because they are Israeli. “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,” he told Variety.

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor previously worked together on No Other Land, alongside Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. The documentary, which examines the displacement of Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank, won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2025. Kaouther Ben Hania is serving on this year's Venice jury, led by American actress and filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal, which will announce the festival's award winners on Saturday.