“Naza”, interview with directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor

In competition for the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 2026, Naza, shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, is built from the testimony of twenty-four Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers describing their part in what the film’s own synopsis calls Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

Directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor previously co-directed the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, about the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta, together with Basel and Hamdan Ballal, their Palestinian co-directors.Here, they talk about persuading soldiers to speak, the range of guilt and detachment among their subjects, and why they insist that what the film documents is not an accident but a system.

Building trust, not persuasion

How hard was it to get twenty-four intelligence officers and soldiers to describe, in his words, “their participation in this genocide of Israel on the Palestinian people”?. Abraham pushes back gently on the framing of persuasion itself: “In the world of investigative journalism, I’m not sure I would use the word convincing. It’s more about you want to approach people to ask the question, and you build a kind of connection with someone, or you build trust over time. It’s a process”.

Their willingness to talk, he says, varied widely: “For some of them it was easier to say yes. Some of them felt a certain sense that they have committed a crime, and they want to talk about it and to share it with more Israelis, with people all over the world. Others it was harder for them to say yes”. What mattered most, he adds, was the specificity of the questions: “The question that interested us from the very start is to get them to describe in as much detail as possible this system of killing, and how it looked like. What tools did they use? […] Sometimes when you ask, and when you are persistent, then you find the answers”.

Levels of guilt, and the apartments watching TV

Asked how the film handles the different degrees of guilt on display among its subjects, Szor says that was never the primary focus: “There’s many different levels of guilt, or awareness, or really a range of emotions that you can see from those officers and soldiers. I must say that when we made the film, it was less of our interest — the main thing that we’re interested in is describing the system, the mass killing system”. The psychology of participation, she says, is still present in the film, and connects directly to the choice of also showing ordinary life at home: “I think we point most of the time our look to people watching TV, mainstream media in Israel, not reporting the result, or using this language of a terror attack”. For Szor, the underlying question stayed the same throughout: “Those were the questions that we were more asking ourselves: how is this system operating?”.

The weight, and the limits, of an Oscar

Asked whether the attention around No Other Land, from Berlin to the Oscars, made this film easier or harder to make, Abraham describes a hope that went largely unanswered: “We had real hope that the film No Other Land , that won the Oscar and is about a community called Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, all of us also with Basel and Hamdan Ballal, our Palestinian co-directors, we really hoped the film would have an impact on the ground, and unfortunately it did not have a major impact. Just this week, two villages in that community were completely destroyed by the Israeli military occupation”.

That same attention, he says, is part of why they made a second film at all: “We won the Oscar and we made a lot of connections, and in that sense I think that is part of why we wanted to make another film, because we have a certain power now because of the first film, we knew people might pay more attention to the second film that we make. So we thought that this is the most important topic to discuss: what is happening in Gaza”. A spotlight, he concludes, that carries its own weight: “You have a spotlight sometimes on you, and that can come with certain complications, and at the same time it comes with a certain responsibility to speak and to do”.

A system, not an accident

Szor returns to two points the directors had already stressed at the press conference: that what the film documents is still happening, and that it is systemic. “It was important for us to say that it’s still ongoing, it’s not some sort of reflection. And I think generally also in No Other Land, we were interested in the system, not in some sort of a crime that a soldier is doing”. She gives a concrete example from the film itself: “When looking at how they were doing the bombing in Gaza, we see that the system is built to bomb civilian houses. It was important for us to show that this is not something that happens by accident, but it’s a policy and a system”.

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