After facing life-threatening blowback for their previous film, No Other Land, which saw members of the four-person filmmaking team kidnapped by Israeli soldiers, directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor return home for an unprecedented view of Israel’s Gaza genocide. NAZA, the new film from Abraham and Szor, is a collection of interviews with Israeli whistleblowers from the military and intelligence community. Shot from the rooftops of Tel Aviv in the dead of night, the filmmakers learn about the allotted number of civilian casualties the IDF accepts in its bombardments, a number that seemingly has no limit. The first trailer for NAZA brings viewers to those heights to see the real lows of humanity. Here’s how the directors describe their mission:
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.