There is a word, in every war, that works in the shadows more than any weapon. It is the word that softens, that smoothes, that transforms a corpse into a cipher and a massacre into an administrative practice. Victor Klemperer, the philologist who secretly wrote down the regime's language in Nazi Germany, called it LTI, Lingua Tertii Imperii, showing how the Third Reich corrupted words to the point of emptying them of meaning. So, when the Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor title their documentary with a military acronym, NAZA (from Nezek Agavi, «collateral damage»), they make a gesture that is anything but neutral: they give back to the word the weight of the bodies that it hides.
NAZA, presented in competition at the 83rd Venice International Film Festival (world premiere in the Sala Grande on 10 September 2026), is the new film by two of the four authors of No Other Land, the documentary awarded with the 2025 Oscar. Produced by The Guardian and James Wilson, with Jonathan Glazer as executive producer, it collects the testimonies of twenty-four Israeli intelligence officers and soldiers to illuminate, from the inside, the mechanisms of what the film denounces it as genocide, as defined by a United Nations commission and important human rights organizations.
It all happens at night, on the rooftops of Tel Aviv. It is there that the filmmakers conducted, over three years, their secret conversations with officers and soldiers involved in the remote surveillance or killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Faces and voices have been digitally altered (a choice imposed by the need to protect sources who, by their own admission, exposed themselves to retaliation by the Israeli state), so that what we see are silhouettes, profiles, shadows that stand out against the bright skyline of the city.
On the other hand, darkness is not just a security measure: it is the very feature of the film, its thesis transformed into light. Darkness favors crimes that must remain secret, but it equally favors honesty, since in the darkness people say what they would remain silent in the light of day. NAZA's most revealing moments emerge just as the lights go out, in a secular confession that doesn't seek absolution.
That Jonathan Glazer is listed as executive producer is not a rotogravure detail. NAZA clearly inherits the ethical lesson of The Zone of Interest, the film with which the British director narrated Auschwitz without ever showing it, keeping the horror off-screen and yet, as he himself explained, "never out of the mind". Here the geography is repeated with reversed roles: the camera observes Tel Aviv, the liberal and wealthy center of Israel, while about sixty kilometers away Gaza is destroyed. Gaza is present through its absence.
Every evening, at eight o'clock, millions of Israelis gather in front of the news: a national ritual that the film interrogates like a bubble, filming the city as if it were itself under surveillance. The illuminated windows, the daily life that continues undisturbed become the silent reverse shot of the massacre. It is not surprising that the sound score (credited for the «other drones») features Mica Levi, already responsible for the music of Under the Skin and La zona d'interest: the same ability to make the subsoil of an apparently quiet image vibrate.
Let's go back to the word. NAZA is the acronym with which, according to the film, the Israeli secret services indicate the number of civilians expected to be killed in an air attack: the "collateral damage" calculated in advance. It is here that the documentary makes its sharpest accusation: if the victims are foreseen and taken into account, then most of the killings would not be a mistake, but rather a conscious outcome. The issue, NAZA argues, is that of intentionality, and systems reveal it no less than minds, through the rules they set, the objectives they authorize, the risks they accept.
The film builds on years of investigative journalism written by Abraham together with Harry Davies of the Guardian (here also a producer), in collaboration with the Israeli-Palestinian newspaper +972 Magazine and with the Hebrew language site Local Call: the investigations into target identification systems entrusted to artificial intelligence, christened (in an irony that freezes the blood) "Lavender" and "The Gospel", later confirmed by the New York Times, Washington Post and Associated Press. In the era of big data, the film warns, the machine can produce an infinite flow of justifications, transforming every massacre into an objective generated by the algorithm. So much so that one of the pillars of international humanitarian law, the principle of distinction between military and civilian objectives, risks turning into its opposite.
There is a gesture in the film that is worth more than a thousand statistics. The directors ask their interviewees to illustrate the futuristic hi-tech systems with pen and paper, in rudimentary hand-drawn diagrams. The result is a very powerful short circuit: the most sophisticated technology reduced to a scribble and, at the same time, the revelation of how those who operate those systems see and represent their victims, reducing them to dots on a screen. It is the gaze of someone who kills at a distance, returned in its chilling ordinariness.
The motivations of those who agreed to speak, one can imagine, were different: some moved by shame and a sense of guilt, others by an almost professional pride in the skills acquired over years of service in the most secret units. But NAZA doesn't dwell on them. It is a deliberate, and at times unsettling, choice: the center of gravity of the film remains the killing itself and what makes it possible, not the internal torment of those who carried it out. Moving it, the authors explained, would have meant moving away from the victims, and that was not what they wanted.
At the Venetian press conference, questioned about the references to the Shoah which also run through the film, the authors handled the matter with extreme caution. Not an equation, they reiterated, but the recognition of recurring patterns of dehumanization: and it is no coincidence that, speaking from Italy, one of them evoked Primo Levi and his reflection on how a human being can be transformed into a thing, into dust to be erased. Hannah Arendt's "banality of evil" also hovers in the background, recalled by a question from the audience.
Israelis, Jews, with Holocaust survivors in their families, the directors claim the right and duty to look their society in the face, and reject the accusation of anti-Semitism as a strategy to repress the truth. The title itself, moreover, is a manifesto against silence: that silence which, as NAZA suggests, makes everyone a little complicit, and which the word-euphemism serves to protect. For the authors, breaking that silence means knowing how to read the patterns of the past in the present and draw universal lessons from them, valid for everyone's rights.
NAZA is not a film you watch: it is a film that demands accountability. Formally rigorous, built by subtraction, it entrusts its strength not to the explicit images of violence (with which we are now saturated) but to the unsaid, the off-screen, the silence that surrounds every testimony. It is cinema that is born from journalism and goes beyond it, in search of a truth that reportage alone could not achieve.
Naturally, on one of the most lacerating and controversial topics of the present, the film takes a position without ambiguity, from the point of view of two Israeli authors who choose to put their society on trial from the inside. As a cinematic object and as a moral act it possesses a gravity and coherence that make it one of the most necessary and discussed titles of this Exhibition, as well as a serious candidate to leave its mark on the palmarès. In a festival that last year was centered around The Voice of Hind Rajab, the Great Hall returns to become a sounding board for an open wound.
On the other hand, everything returns to the word from which we started. As long as a massacre can be classified as NAZA, as collateral damage, it will be easier to deny it. And denial, the film warns, is what allows the crimes to continue. Breaking that last, convenient word is perhaps, in NAZA's argument, its most political gesture.
