Must-Watch Indies: Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor's NAZA
Advertisement
Screens Saturday November 14 – 7:30pm (+ intro), Sunday November 15 – 6:00pm, Thursday November 19 – 7:00pm, Saturday November 21 – 5:00pm, and Sunday November 22 – 6:00pm
“NAZA is of a piece with The Zone of Interest — an elegant film about unthinkable barbarity” – Ray Pride, New City Film
Saturday, November 14th screening will be preceded by an introduction from Must-Watch Indies programmer and film critic Marya E. Gates.
Filmed in secret at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, No Other Land co-directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s follow up film NAZA offers a window into the systems, policies, and practices behind the Israeli military’s targeted mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza.
Deriving its name from the phrase “Nezek Agavi,” a military code word that means collateral damage, journalist and Oscar-winning filmmaker Yuval Abraham, along with co-director Rachel Szor, secretly filmed on rooftops in Tel Aviv between 2023 and 2025 as they conducted interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers. Building on Abraham’s previous reporting, these revealing interviews shine a light on the targeted mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza using AI systems and mobile phone surveillance to identify targets, as well as other atrocities involving the killing of civilians during food distribution aid drops.
In between these eye-opening interviews, the filmmakers pan across nightlife in Tel Aviv, where life goes on as normal just a few miles from Gaza, evoking the same unease as executive producer Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning drama The Zone of Interest.
NAZA made its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival where it won a Special Jury Prize and screened at the New York Film Festival.
Content Advisory: death and/or dying, blood, Islamophobia
Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, 77 mins, United States, UK, 2026, DCP, English, Hebrew, Arabic
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 dehumanization 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
“NAZA is of a piece with The Zone of Interest — an elegant film about unthinkable barbarity” – Ray Pride, New City Film
Saturday, November 14th screening will be preceded by an introduction from Must-Watch Indies programmer and film critic Marya E. Gates.
Filmed in secret at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, No Other Land co-directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s follow up film NAZA offers a window into the systems, policies, and practices behind the Israeli military’s targeted mass killing of Palestinians in Gaza.
Deriving its name from the phrase “Nezek Agavi,” a military code word that means collateral damage, journalist and Oscar-winning filmmaker Yuval Abraham, along with co-director Rachel Szor, secretly filmed on rooftops in Tel Aviv between 2023 and 2025 as they conducted interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers. Building on Abraham’s previous reporting, these revealing interviews shine a light on the targeted mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza using AI systems and mobile phone surveillance to identify targets, as well as other atrocities involving the killing of civilians during food distribution aid drops.
In between these eye-opening interviews, the filmmakers pan across nightlife in Tel Aviv, where life goes on as normal just a few miles from Gaza, evoking the same unease as executive producer Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning drama The Zone of Interest.
NAZA made its world premiere at the Venice Film Festival where it won a Special Jury Prize and screened at the New York Film Festival.
Content Advisory: death and/or dying, blood, Islamophobia
Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, 77 mins, United States, UK, 2026, DCP, English, Hebrew, Arabic
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 dehumanization 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
Advertisement
Where is it happening?
FACETS, 1517 W Fullerton Ave,Chicago, Illinois, United States
Event Location & Nearby Stays:
Know what’s Happening Next — before everyone else does.
Host or PublisherCinema Her Way: Visionary Female Directors in Their Own Words
