Global release announced for acclaimed Gaza documentary NAZA

NAZA, the award-winning documentary from Israeli film-makers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, is set to be released in cinemas in more than 50 countries before a digital global release on theguardian.com.The film, which The Guardian produced, premiered at the Venice film festival earlier this month, where it was met with a 25-minute standing ovation – a festival record. The documentary went on to win the special jury prize.After screenings in Bologna and at the San Sebastián film festival, the film will receive its North American premiere on Saturday at the New York film festival before opening four days later at the IFC Center in New York City. On 9 October it will expand to Los Angeles and other key US cities before a national rollout.A theatrical release in partnership with MK2 Films is also planned in 55 other territories, including the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Canada, Hong Kong, Brazil, Turkey, Thailand, France, Spain, Germany, Turkey, Central America and the Middle East.After its run in cinemas, the film will stream on The Guardian’s website, for free, as part of the news organisation’s commitment to the dissemination of independent journalism.“NAZA is grounded in rigorous journalism published over the past three years,” said Harry Davies, a Guardian investigations correspondent and one of NAZA’s producers. “But it is also a powerful piece of cinema that will soon be available on screens, large and small, around the world.”Documentary NAZA gets 25-minute standing ovation at Venice film festival premiere – videoA number of distributors and cinemas in Israel have been offered the film, and The Guardian is exploring ways by which NAZA can be seen in the occupied Palestinian territories.The documentary reveals the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. NAZA is a military acronym euphemistically used by Israeli intelligence to indicate the number of civilians that it expects will be killed in an airstrike.Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film features interviews with 24 members of Israeli intelligence and military, granted on the condition of anonymity. The film builds on journalism first published by The Guardian, +972 Magazine, an Israeli-Palestinian publication, and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call between 2023 and 2025.In 2024, Abraham and Szor won the best documentary Oscar for No Other Land, along with their two Palestinian co-directors, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. Jonathan Glazer, the Oscar-winning film-maker of The Zone of Interest and Under the Skin, has executive produced, while his longtime collaborator, James Wilson of JW Films, also produced the film.The film won unanimously positive reviews at its premiere, but last week Benjamin Netanyahu and a number of senior military and far-right political figures called for the directors’ citizenship to be revoked, and accused them of “treason against the state”.The Israeli prime minister said he would seek new laws allowing the country to strip citizenship from people who “smear” Israeli soldiers and “defame” the state of Israel. Alongside the announcement, dozens of rightwing activists gathered outside Szor’s parents’ home.Police and border police officers were deployed at the scene. One protester called for the “death penalty for traitors” and demanded that the homes of the film-makers’ families be demolished.Speaking on Thursday, Abraham and Szor said: “We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israelis to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible.“The threats from the Israeli government to revoke our citizenship and the death threats do not change that and will not stop the film. We thank our colleagues for the solidarity and look forward to sharing NAZA all over the world very soon.”Last week, 43 local human rights organisations issued a joint statement urging Israeli authorities to stop what they described as incitement and threats against the film-makers, and not to prosecute either them or their sources.More than 1,500 Israeli film-makers have also signed a petition defending “freedom of expression and creation” and expressing solidarity with Szor and Abraham.Their sentiments have been echoed by a number of leading film-makers around the world, including Ken Loach, Joshua Oppenheimer, Paul Laverty, Laura Poitras, Nan Goldin, Richard Eyre and Hanif Kureishi. Oppenheimer, the US director of Oscar-nominated documentaries The Act of Killing and The Look of Silence, said, “The Israeli government is waging a full-scale intimidation campaign against film directors. I am appalled and enraged.”