Critics around the world have hailed the NAZA award-winning documentary as a “brilliant and heartbreaking” film that is “impossible to ignore.”
NAZA, produced by the Guardian and detailing Israel’s massacres of civilians in Gaza, was released in UK cinemas this week and will be screened in more than 50 countries. In addition to its worldwide cinema releases, NAZA will be available for free on the Guardian website from the end of November.
The investigative documentary, which contains 24 interviews with members of the Israeli army speaking anonymously at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, has received widespread praise.
In a five-star review, Danny Leigh of the Financial Times says that, in the context of film, “journalism and cinema intertwine brilliantly.” The Times calls the film a “hugely provocative and disturbing account” of Israel’s massacre of civilians in Gaza, and the Irish Times calls NAZA “an essential tale of an engineered nightmare.” In a four-star review, the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw says “Gaza’s angst is on full display.”
British Vogue calls NAZA a “brilliant and heartbreaking film” that depicts the “sober, meticulous and chilling depiction of the gradual erasure of Gaza.” The magazine says the film “seems destined to become a lasting historical document, one that will and must be seen by generations to come.”
Time Out magazine says NAZA “builds a sober, intelligent, articulate, precise and absolutely damning case against Israel’s actions in Gaza and their ongoing actions in the region. As a work of cinema, it is exemplary. As a work of journalism, it is indisputable. As a document, it is an indictment.”
The New York Times named the film a “Critics’ Pick” and called NAZA a “haunting” documentary that was “difficult to watch and impossible to ignore.” The Los Angeles Times says NAZA is a “cold scary” film that “burns the conscience.” And New York magazine describes it as “one of the most important films of our time.”
The Hollywood Reporter praised NAZA as a “sober, painstakingly researched expose” that “leaves one with a deafening feeling, as if humanity had lost all hope.” The Toronto Star states that “NAZA is a harrowing but essential spectacle, challenging the systems that cause and quantify civilian deaths in modern warfare.”
Spanish media outlet El Mundo hailed NAZA as “the film of our time, a superb, electrifying and devastating documentary about the systematic pattern of annihilation of the Palestinian people” that ultimately “points the finger at us.” At night, in silence.”
French newspaper Le Monde says the film “has the effect of an uppercut that leaves the viewer stunned,” while Danish cultural magazine Soundvenue calls NAZA a “heartbreaking testimony to the genocide in Gaza” that is an “example of how the world increasingly resembles a dystopia.”
The UAE’s national newspaper, The National, calls NAZA “a terribly difficult film to watch,” and an editorial in Israeli newspaper Haaretz says the film “attempts to force Israelis to confront what they already know: that Israel’s conduct of the war in Gaza has left a dark stain.”
When the film was released in Italy last month, it topped the charts. The Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera says that NAZA lasts “only 80 minutes, but no more is needed: the ‘scientific’ coldness with which those interviewed reconstruct the way in which they are destroying Gaza is something unforgettable.”
The film contains 24 interviews with members of the Israeli military that detail how an AI-assisted mass surveillance device was activated during the Gaza War, revealing the systems that were used to target Hamas members, knowing that large numbers of Palestinian civilians would also die.
Various organizations, including the UN, Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, the latter two based in Israel, have declared that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.
The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it received a 25-minute standing ovation – a festival record. The documentary won the Special Jury Prize.
Gn world
