No Other Land Team Returns with Naza, Supported by Jonathan Glazer, Added to Venice and NYFF Programs.

      Two of the filmmakers behind the essential and impactful documentary of 2024, No Other Land (which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary and the Indie Film Site Network Advocate Award), are coming back to examine the destruction and violence experienced by Palestinians.

      The 83rd Venice International Film Festival has announced that Naza, a new project by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, will compete at the festival and premiere on September 10, followed by its North American debut at the 64th New York Film Festival. The film has been produced by The Guardian and James Wilson (JW Films), with executive production by Jonathan Glazer, director of The Zone of Interest. Wilson and Glazer are the Oscar-winning duo behind The Zone of Interest.

      The synopsis reads: “Filmed at night from the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film intricately reveals the mechanisms behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” The directors, producers, Guardian journalists, and the official delegation will be present at the premiere.

      “The title Naza is a term that recurs throughout the documentary. It is a military acronym used by Israeli intelligence as a euphemism to indicate the anticipated number of civilians who will be killed in an airstrike,” The Guardian states, adding that the film “builds upon revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian outlet +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language site Local Call, and The Guardian between 2023 and 2025.”

      Rory O’Connor remarked in his review of No Other Land, which we named as one of the best films of 2024, “Amidst the carnage and statistics of recent events, the relentless and calculated nature of the decades-long conflict on ordinary Palestinian lives is often overlooked: the daily humiliations endured by those who must navigate checkpoints to reach work; or the ceaseless micro and macro aggressions faced by those living near the border. This latter aspect is portrayed in No Other Land, a powerful documentary premiering today at the Berlinale that chronicles the friendship of Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist from the West Bank, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli investigative journalist who supports his cause. Spanning from 2019 to December of last year, the film serves as a crucial record of the erasure of Adra’s area, Masafer Yatta––an organized offensive characterized in the press notes as ‘the largest single act of forced transfer ever conducted in the occupied West Bank.’”