The much-anticipated documentary by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor I am It made it to the Venice Film Festival and the reviews started to roll in.
The two Israeli directors previously worked with Palestinian directors on the Oscar-winning film No other land. Their new film, according to the film’s synopsis, “filmed at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, exposes in detail the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass murder of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.”
The film was produced by the news agency The Guardian Along with James Wilson (JW Films) and produced by Jonathan Glazer. Wilson and Glazer are an Oscar-winning team Area of interest.
The early notices are very strong for the film.
The Hollywood Reporter describes the film as “a sobering, indispensable documentary that shines a light on the modern, immoral killing machine used by the IDF in Gaza”: “It is difficult to describe all the emotions that watching a film like Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szur’s arouses.” I am. Anger for sure. Insult as well. There is certainly disgust, on a deep level, towards the current Israeli regime and its Prime Minister, Bibi Netanyahu.
Indiewire gave the film an A: “A documentary that exposes the brutal machinery of modern genocide. ‘NAZA’ gets its name from a euphemistic abbreviation used casually by Israeli intelligence. It refers to the number of civilians designated as ‘Nezek Agavi’ or ‘Nezek Agavi.’ Collateral damage in an air raid – that is, before air raid. The title is also an onomatopoeia: the film may be journalistic in origin, but its cinematic influences are quite evident disgusting. Over the course of just 80 minutes filmed on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the Israeli half of the group behind the West Bank land grab “No Other Earth” — directors Rachel Szur and Yuval Abraham — conduct interviews with anonymous sources in the Israeli military that detail their approach to graphics and words. However, their silence is equally revealing.
IonCinema gives the film 4/5 stars: “Although most of the documentary actually consists of secret rooftop conversations, several well-placed archival moments underscore contradictory elements at play, including an old clip of Netanyahu explicitly stating that killing innocent women and children for political gain or influence is actually terrorism. Miserable but essential to the incredible depth of contrast at play.
The film received a Best Next Film award of 9/10 and received an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature: “A gripping picture that highlights the horrific conflict in Gaza, with viewpoints detailing a disturbing system of managing the carnage. The themes provide insightful detail of horrific practices, and the filmmaking helps underscore thematic commentary on the disconnect between levels of humanity. It’s an important message delivered in an interesting way.”
Screen International describes the film as “an urgent and poignant document of the world”. No other land directors, while The Wrap described it as “a grim indictment of the IDF.”
The International Society of Cinephiles gave it 4.5/5 stars, stating: “In No Other Land, Abraham and Szor told a story by documenting it first-hand. In NAZA, the scope and importance are greater, but the film’s strongest achievement is not its story, but rather the additional cinematic meditation on who lives and who dies, and how similar the two are.
Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian gave the film 4/5 stars. In a positive article, Bradshaw highlights one or two drawbacks, including the challenge of not being able to disclose their sources. At another point he writes: “The ahistorical comparison to Nazism is inevitably and explicitly invoked by one of the speakers. But Gaza, however horrific, is not the same as the Holocaust. This specious similarity is quite readily available; the bombing of Dresden is the most obvious comparison. In any case, Gaza’s suffering is brought into sharp focus.”
