The Venice Film Festival has added a hot-button documentary to its Competition lineup.
The synopsis for new film Naza reads: “Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film reveals in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza”.
The film heralds from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four co-directors of the 2025 Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land.
It has been produced by UK news outlet The Guardian, and James Wilson (JW Films) and executive-produced by Jonathan Glazer. Wilson and Glazer are the Oscar-winning team behind The Zone of Interest. The duo’s speech at the Oscars following their win was the source of a considerable amount of chatter in the days following.
The film will be screened in the Sala Grande (Palazzo del Cinema) on 10 September at 5.15pm, in the presence of the directors, the producers, Guardian journalists and the official delegation.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor join nine other directors (across 21 films) making their debut in the Venice Film Festival’s Competition, alongside Casey Affleck, Alì Asgari, Danny Boyle, May el-Toukhy, Cédric Kahn, Ilya Khrzhanovsky, Lance Oppenheim, Nicolas Pariser and Paolo Strippoli.
Oscar winner No Other Land showed the destruction of a Palestinian community in the occupied West Bank, which had been resisting forced displacement after an Israeli “firing zone” was declared on their land.
Israel’s settlement policies in the occupied West Bank have drawn condemnation from the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Canada in recent days. All settlements are illegal under international law.
Wilson and Glazer were recently producer and executive producer respectively on Venice 2025 drama and Oscar nominee The Voice Of Hind Rajab, about the final hours of a six-year-old Palestinian girl trapped in a car under fire in Gaza in January 2024. Israeli authorities last week opened a criminal investigation into the death.