If you keep the chag, you’ve been off your phone since Friday evening. Candles at erev Rosh Hashanah, Shabbat and the first day landing on top of each other on Saturday, the second day coming in Saturday night and running until stars out on Sunday. Call it 49 hours. Most years that’s fine, because the world has the decency to stay boring for two days.
Not this year. The 83rd Venice Film Festival held its closing ceremony on Saturday night and gave its Special Jury Prize to NAZA, a documentary about the Israeli military’s targeting of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, made by two Israelis. Everybody else spent the weekend arguing about it. The rest of us walked into it cold on Sunday night, which is why you’re reading this on Monday instead of Saturday.
Sandy Koufax sat out Game One of the 1965 World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur, and American Jews, usually somebody’s parents or grandparents, have not shut up about it since. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four directors who won the documentary Oscar last year for No Other Land, spent Rosh Hashanah on a red carpet in Venice.
NAZA premiered on the Lido on Thursday, September 10, and got a 25 minute standing ovation, the longest Venice has recorded. Erev Rosh Hashanah was Friday night. The closing ceremony ran Saturday evening, as the second day of the chag was coming in at home, and that’s when Abraham and Szor, looking appropriately (performatively?) stone faced and sombre, collected the prize.
Israel isn’t a theocracy and I’m not the Taliban. I don’t care what Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor do on Rosh Hashanah. Their mothers probably do, but that’s none of my business either, and given what happened the last time Abraham won a prize in Berlin, when a mob showed up at his parents’ house in Beersheba and the family fled to another town in the middle of the night, I’m not going to be the guy asking.
Who they are
Yuval Abraham is a journalist from Beersheba who reports for +972 Magazine and Local Call, and there’s one thing in his biography that matters here. At 19 he was assigned to the IDF Intelligence Corps. A week into the training course, once he understood what the job involved, he refused it, finished his few remaining weeks as an air force quartermaster and left. He has said he didn’t want Arabic to become a weapon in his hands. Ten years on he’s made a film built entirely out of 24 people who, unlike him, took the job and did it.
The speech that brought the mob to his parents’ gate was at the Berlinale in February 2024, where he called the situation apartheid and German politicians including Berlin mayor Kai Wegner called the evening Antisemitic. A year later he told Israeli television he accepted the criticism from people who noticed he hadn’t mentioned the hostages, and that in retrospect he would have. Keep that in mind when the responses to this one come in.
Rachel Szor is the cinematographer on both films and co-directed both. On No Other Land the camera credit is hers alone. She said almost nothing publicly through the entire Oscar campaign, telling Deadline in Venice that this is just her personality, and her Wikipedia page still has no biography, just credits. So the look of this one, the altered faces on Tel Aviv rooftops at night, is her decision, and the reviewers praising the film’s restraint are mostly praising her.
The film is reporting before it is a film
This is the part most of the coverage skips. NAZA didn’t appear from nowhere. Abraham had been investigating Israeli targeting systems, AI-assisted selection and mass surveillance of Palestinians for +972 and Local Call from before October 7, and later with The Guardian. The Lavender investigation ran on April 3, 2024, and that’s where the system names and the target numbers first appeared. The filmmakers say some of the testimony they gathered was urgent enough that they published it immediately rather than hold it for the film.
So the movie is three years of night shooting wrapped around a body of published journalism. Nobody is disclosing what that actually means. Abraham found the sources and wrote the investigations for +972 and Local Call. The Guardian co-published them. The Guardian then produced his film. Harry Davies, one of the Guardian reporters who worked those investigations with him, worked on the film’s edit. So when a review tells you the claims in NAZA are corroborated by earlier reporting, the earlier reporting is the director’s, and the outlet vouching for it is the one that financed the movie. There’s a phrase for this and it’s marking your own homework. It doesn’t make any of it automatically false, and news organizations co-producing documentaries out of their own investigations is ordinary practice. What isn’t ordinary is that almost nobody covering this film has mentioned it.
It’s also not the first time the three of them have run a number together. Last August the Guardian, +972 and Local Call, Abraham co-writing with the Guardian’s Emma Graham-Harrison, reported that a classified Aman database showed 8,900 named Hamas and PIJ fighters dead as of May 2025, against 53,000 dead overall, and ran it as 83 percent of the dead being civilians. The catch is that the database lists militants the army had identified by name. Anyone the army hadn’t identified, which includes the unrecovered, the unidentified and every fighter from a faction that isn’t Hamas or PIJ, counted as a civilian by default. The finding underneath it is real and bad enough on its own, that Israel could put a confirmed name to fewer than one in six of the people it killed. That’s not what the front page said.
Worth noting too that this is officially a British film. No Other Land went to the Oscars as a Palestinian-Norwegian production. Neither one is an Israeli entry, whatever anybody calls them.
The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit rejected the film’s central claim the day before the ceremony, arguing that nobody can verify who these 24 people are, whether they served, in what capacity, or whether they were near the systems they describe.
And Jonathan Glazer
The executive producer credit belongs to Jonathan Glazer, which is not a footnote. Glazer directed The Zone of Interest, about the commandant of Auschwitz and his family living their ordinary domestic life on the other side of the camp wall. Accepting its Oscar on March 10, 2024, he said he and his colleagues stood there “as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation.”
He said it flanked by two men who hadn’t been told it was coming. Len Blavatnik, executive producer, put out word through a spokesperson that he hadn’t signed off on the speech and that his support for Israel is unchanged. Danny Cohen, the other executive producer and co-financier, went on the Unholy podcast and said he fundamentally disagreed, that he blames Hamas for the war and the hostages, that his own support for Israel is unwavering, and that the speech was a distraction from a remarkable film. More than 1,200 Jewish entertainment professionals signed an open letter answering Glazer line for line. The ADL called the remarks morally reprehensible. When the director of a Holocaust film needs his own financiers to issue clarifications, the speech wasn’t the triumph the room thought it was.
The room had its own problems that night. A row of stars turned up wearing the Artists4Ceasefire pin, a red circle with a hand on it: Mark Ruffalo, Billie Eilish, Finneas, Ava DuVernay, Ramy Youssef, Mahershala Ali, Quannah Chasinghorse. Nobody appears to have mentioned to any of them what a raised red hand means in this particular conflict. On October 12, 2000, two Israeli reservists, Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossi Avrahami, took a wrong turn into Ramallah and were detained by Palestinian Authority police. A mob stormed the station and beat and stabbed them to death, and the image that came to define the Second Intifada is Aziz Salha at the window, holding his blood-covered hands up to a cheering crowd. Twenty-four years later Hollywood pinned it to its lapels and called it a peace symbol. Artists4Ceasefire says the hand is orange. That incredulity and disgust we felt? That’s our problem.
And here’s the part nobody has connected. Cohen said Glazer hadn’t run the speech past him, and that as he understood it Glazer had worked it out with James Wilson, the producer standing next to him. That’s the same James Wilson, of JW Films, who is now the producer of NAZA, alongside The Guardian. The pairing that gave you the most divisive Oscar speech in recent memory didn’t break up. It found a new subject.
About that prize
The Special Jury Prize is not the top award and it is not second. The Golden Lion went to Woman Unknown, and below that sit two Silver Lions. This comes after all of them. It’s also a young category: Venice used the name for what is now the second place prize until 2012, then recycled it in 2013 for a lower one. NAZA was tipped by a lot of critics for the Golden Lion. The jury placed it fourth.
One more fact about that jury, offered without a theory attached. Wilson also produced The Voice of Hind Rajab, which won the Silver Lion here last year. Its director, Kaouther Ben Hania, was one of the seven jurors this year, under president Maggie Gyllenhaal. Shared credits among jurors and competitors are ordinary at every festival on earth and nobody has alleged anything. It’s simply a small world, and worth knowing how small.
One last thing about the venue
Venice spent the weekend being treated as a moral tribunal. It was founded in 1932 by Count Giuseppe Volpi di Misurata, a Fascist Party member who had been Mussolini’s finance minister. From 1934 its top prize was the Mussolini Cup. In 1935 it added an acting award named for the founder, the Coppa Volpi, and that’s still what the acting trophies are called. Leni Riefenstahl, Hitler’s fave filmmaker, took a silver medal there in 1932, an award for Triumph of the Will in 1935, and the Mussolini Cup for Olympia in 1938.
Nobody serious lines up Abraham and Szor with Riefenstahl. Two Israelis attacking their own government are doing the opposite of what she did. But here’s the thing worth holding onto when the headlines say Venice has judged Israel. A prize is not a finding of fact. It tells you what one jury of seven people thought of a film, in a building that has been rewarding politically congenial cinema since a Fascist opened it. If NAZA is true, it’s true because those 24 people are who they say they are and because the reporting underneath it holds up. A Lion doesn’t make it true and wouldn’t have made it false. That work is still ahead, and the people cheering loudest on Saturday night aren’t the ones who will do it.
Koufax, by the way, came back and threw a shutout in Game Seven.
UPDATE, September 14
I posted this Monday morning. The Israeli response had already come in Sunday evening, while the chag was going out, and I am including it now.
Culture Minister Miki Zohar accused Abraham and Szor of treason and announced that he would act immediately to revoke their Israeli citizenship. National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir posted that they’re a disgrace to the entire Jewish people, told them to go away, and offered his confidence that Hamas would welcome them with open arms.
Zohar cannot do this. Since a 2022 Supreme Court ruling, revoking Israeli citizenship requires the interior minister to submit the request, the justice minister to approve it and judges to validate it. The culture ministry appears nowhere in that chain. He wasn’t describing a step he intends to take. He was issuing a press release for an audience that will never read past the headline. I feel like government Ministers would benefit from a course detailing what they can and cannot do. Yalla, get on the short bus Miki!
Ben-Gvir is a troll. It’s what he does, and at this point I’m not sure any single Israeli has handed our enemies more ammunition than the man we put in charge of national security. By Monday morning both statements were circulating as evidence of Israeli government policy. They aren’t. No cabinet decision was taken, no interior minister has moved, the prime minister has said nothing, and the one minister making the threat has no authority to carry it out. That distinction won’t survive ten seconds on social media, and both of them knew it when they hit send.
I’m no fan of their work. I think NAZA is built on testimony nobody can check and reporting that vouches for itself. That’s a judgment about the film, not about them. I have nothing personal against Yuval Abraham or Rachel Szor, and I respect them as fellow Jews and fellow citizens. I would rather live in a country where they can say whatever they like than one where saying it costs them their citizenship. Criticizing your own government is not treason. It has never been treason.
Meanwhile the IDF made an actual argument, which is what the government should have been doing all along. A promotional clip for the film has an interviewee claiming a strike was once approved with 500 expected civilian deaths. The military says that’s completely false, that it never planned, approved or carried out anything close, and that no credible claim of such a strike surfaced at any point in the war. It says the filmmakers couldn’t possibly have verified it and ran it anyway, and that nothing about the interviewee, his service or his role can be independently checked. It also says strike approval was done by people rather than by artificial intelligence, and that some of the excerpts describe strategy well above the pay grade of the junior soldiers supposedly describing it. Abraham called the reporting rigorous, pointed at the Guardian partnership, and said the filmmakers have received threats.
Worth sitting with one number while that fight plays out. The IDF’s own working estimate is two to three civilians killed for every operative. In dense urban warfare against an enemy that fights from inside a civilian population, that isn’t a scandalous figure. It’s roughly what you’d expect from a military trying to hit combatants and often failing to protect the people around them. It is not what a system designed to kill wantonly and indiscriminately produces. That’s the film’s central claim, and the army’s own arithmetic argues against it more effectively than any minister has managed.
Elections are October 27. Just sayin’ is all.
― Tom Robbins
I have out up with the Guardian’s antisemitism for far too long! It is stop to stop my donation.