New People: NAZA

NAZA screenings at NEW PEOPLE start October 9.

Also screens at The Roxie starting October 12.

In secret conversations on the rooftops of Tel Aviv at night, the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza are revealed by the people who designed and operated them.

Directors Note:

We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli filmmakers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible. While filming members of Israel’s military on rooftops at night in Tel Aviv over the past three years, we found ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents’ generation and throughout the 20th century: how does one group of people allow the total dehumanisation of another?

What do the inner workings of such a system look like? Many of the revelations in the film were published almost immediately as we learned of them, in the months following the October 7th attacks, by The Guardian (one of NAZA’s producers), in collaboration with reporting partners +972 Magazine and Local Call. The film lets us explore something deeper than we could in our investigative journalism alone: not only the words being said but also those that are not said, the silence. It is up to all of us to break that silence.

– Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor

“An essential, devastating documentary…there’s no turning away from what’s said, you simply can’t unknow what you have heard” – Nicolas Rapold, Sight and Sound  

“NAZA might be the best present-tense documentary of its time since Citizenfour” – Marshall Shaffer, The Playlist