Yuval Abraham took the stage at the Venice Film Festival and used the moment to push NAZA into the center of the awards conversation. The documentary won the jury's special prize on Saturday, giving the film a result that is now as much about festival recognition as it is about the dispute around its subject.
24 intelligence operatives
NAZA is built around anonymized interviews with 24 Israeli intelligence operatives, filmed at night on rooftops in Tel Aviv. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor are the two Israeli filmmakers behind it, and the title is described as a Hebrew acronym used for counting the number of civilians estimated to be killed in a military strike. That structure gives the film a procedural edge: it is not built like a broad overview, but like an account assembled from named testimony and a defined casualty calculation.
Abraham urged Israelis, Europeans and Americans to watch the film, and he said, “We believe that the denial of a crime is what helps it persist.” He also said, “it's our country that is doing these crimes,” and added, “that Europeans watch it, especially here in Italy because your government and the German government are blocking pressure on Israel that can end this, that Americans watch it because that country is funding much of the killing.”
Venice jury’s special prize
The jury’s special prize is the kind of festival recognition that can lift a documentary from a niche screening into wider international attention. In this case, the award lands at Venice, where the film’s politics and method were already drawing notice, and it gives the project a clear imprimatur from a major festival audience.
Yuval Abraham drives Naza film to Venice traced how the project reached the festival, but the prize changes the commercial and cultural math around it. A documentary with a formal case built from 24 interviews is now carrying an award result that programmers, buyers, and viewers can read without needing a press release to decode it.
Israel, Gaza, and the rebuttal
The film addresses the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023, which killed around 1,200 people in Israel, and the Israeli response that followed. Since October 2023, UN figures say more than 20,000 children have been killed in Gaza, and the film places that toll at the center of its argument. The Israeli army rejected the allegations made in the film, and a spokesman accused Hamas of deliberately embedding military infrastructure in civilian areas.
That split leaves NAZA doing two jobs at once: competing as a festival documentary and functioning as a political object. The Venice prize gives Abraham and Szor a larger platform, but the film’s reach will now be measured by whether audiences in Israel, Europe and America actually watch it after the stage call rather than just hear about the controversy around it.
