Critics around the world have hailed the award-winning documentary NAZA as a “brilliant and harrowing” film that is “impossible to ignore”.
NAZA, which is produced by the Guardian and details Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, was released in UK cinemas this week and will be shown in more than 50 countries. As well as its global cinema releases, NAZA will be available free on the Guardian’s website from late November.
The investigative documentary, which contains 24 interviews with Israeli military insiders speaking anonymously on the rooftops of Tel Aviv at night, has received widespread praise.
In a five-star review, the Financial Times’s Danny Leigh says that as a piece of cinema, “journalism and film-making brilliantly entwine”. The Times calls the film “hugely provocative and a disturbing account” of Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza, and the Irish Times brands NAZA an “essential record of engineered nightmare”. In a four-star review, the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw says the “anguish of Gaza is brought into pin-sharp focus”.
British Vogue calls NAZA a “brilliant and harrowing film” that outlines the “restrained, meticulous, bone-chilling depiction of the progressive erasure of Gaza”. The magazine says the film “feels destined to become an enduring historical document, one which will and should be seen by generations to come”.
Time Out magazine says NAZA “puts together a restrained, intelligent, articulate, precise and utterly damning case against Israel’s actions in Gaza and their ongoing actions through the region. As a work of cinema, it is exemplary. As a work of journalism, it is inarguable. As a document, it is an indictment.”
The New York Times makes the film a “critic’s choice” and calls NAZA a “haunting” documentary that is “tough to watch, and impossible to ignore”. The Los Angeles Times says NAZA is a “stone-cold frightening” film that “burns the conscience”. And in New York magazine, it is described as “one of the most important films of our time”.
The Hollywood Reporter praises NAZA as a “sober and thoroughly documented bombshell of an expose” that “leaves one with a deadening feeling, as if humanity may have lost all hope”. The Toronto Star says “NAZA is heartbreaking but essential viewing, questioning the systems that cause and quantify civilian death in modern warfare”.
NAZA: the film Israel does not want you to see – video
The Spanish outlet El Mundo hailed NAZA as “the film of our time, a superb, electrifying, and devastating documentary about the systematic model of annihilation of the Palestinian people” that ultimately “points the finger at us. At night, in silence.”
The French newspaper Le Monde says the film “has the effect of an uppercut that leaves the viewer stunned”, while the Danish culture magazine Soundvenue calls NAZA a “soul-crushing testimony to the genocide in Gaza” that is an “example of how the world increasingly seems like a dystopia”.
The United Arab Emirates’ state-owned newspaper the National calls NAZA a “sickeningly tough film to watch”, and an editorial in the Israeli-outlet Haaretz says the film is “trying to force Israelis to confront what they already know: that Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza has left a black stain”.
When the film opened in Italy last month, it topped the charts. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera says NAZA lasts “only 80 minutes, but no more is needed: the ‘scientific’ coldness with which the interviewees reconstruct how they are destroying Gaza is something unforgettable”.
The film contains 24 interviews with Israeli military insiders who detail how an AI-assisted apparatus of mass surveillance was activated during the Gaza war, revealing the systems that were used to target Hamas operatives in the knowledge that large numbers of Palestinian civilians would also die.
Various bodies, including the UN, Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, the latter two of which are Israeli-based, have said Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
The film premiered at the Venice film festival, where it was received a 25-minute standing ovation – a festival record. The documentary went on to win the special jury prize.
