Yuval Abraham pushed the Naza film into Venice with a blunt press-conference line: “Please describe to us what you did. How do these systems work? Sketch it out for us.” The documentary screened on Thursday at the Venice international film festival, where it entered the Golden Lion award race as the only documentary in competition.
24 Israeli military insiders supplied the testimony at the center of the film. Their accounts, gathered from intelligence officers and soldiers, describe secret systems used in the war on Gaza, including AI-based targeting, hacked phones, and covert listening into conversations with targets’ wives and children moments before they were killed.
Venice and the rooftop interviews
On rooftops in Tel Aviv, the interviews were filmed at night under anonymity protections. The production altered the participants’ appearance and voices, a practical step that let the film lay out detailed testimony without exposing the people inside the system.
The film’s structure makes the access point the story. Instead of treating the war on Gaza as a series of isolated incidents, it builds from testimony about how targets were selected, tracked, and attacked, then places that inside a competition slot at Venice where documentary work usually arrives with less operational detail than a fiction title.
Benjamin Netanyahu and the system
Several interviewees worked in a secret intelligence unit that reports directly to Benjamin Netanyahu’s office. One interviewee said the unit’s mission was to “thwart peace”. That is the sharpest line in the film because it turns the focus from battlefield chaos to intent, chain of command, and the language used to justify it.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor said, “We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli film-makers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible.” They also said, “It is on the orders themselves, the policies, the accepted practices, the language and logic that make those practices possible, and the people who operate within them.”
Golden Lion award pressure
The screening drew a nearly 25-minute standing ovation, according to Variety. That response matters less as applause than as a signal that Venice treated the film as competition-level work, not just another politically charged documentary dropped into a festival schedule.
The film also details neighborhoods where the Israeli military estimated that up to 25% of residents were still sheltering in their homes, the systematic burning of civilian homes, and the killing of civilians at a food distribution site. For viewers, the most useful takeaway is simple: the film is not built around rumor or abstraction, but around direct testimony, anonymized on camera, about how the machinery of the war on Gaza was described by people who say they operated it.
That leaves the sharper question hanging over the film itself: what specific evidence or documentation backs those accounts beyond the anonymized testimony shown in the documentary. Venice has the premiere; the next test is whether the film’s claims travel with enough detail to survive outside the festival room.
