(photo credit: ABED RAHIM KHATIB/FLASH90)
How many people in Israel, or even around the world, could name the winner of the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival last year? Probably almost no one.
Venice is one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals, but it is an industry event – a place where filmmakers, directors, and producers showcase their latest projects, generate buzz, and hope that distributors and critics take notice. Most of what happens there never reaches the wider public.
Then came NAZA, the documentary by Israeli journalists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor that won the Special Jury Prize at Venice this weekend and almost immediately became the center of a political and public storm in Israel.
The film examines allegations surrounding Israeli military targeting in Gaza, including anonymous testimony from purported soldiers and intelligence officers claiming that the IDF permits “mass killing” with AI-powered tools.
And if the goal of the Israeli officials attacking the film was to prevent people from seeing it, they accomplished exactly the opposite. Culture and Sports Minister Miki Zohar’s announcement that he would seek to revoke the filmmakers’ citizenship only increased the world’s attention to the film. He can be sure that now viewer numbers will go up exponentially.
What Zohar fails to understand is that this is...
The wound of October 7 therefore remains open, and when your own wound is still open, it is difficult to look at somebody else’s. (photo credit: ABED RAHIM KHATIB/FLASH90) How many people in Israel...