NAZA [FILM GEM]

NAZA by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the creators of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, is a revealing film about the systems behind the large-scale civilian deaths in Gaza. On the rooftops of Tel Aviv, far from the war zone, Israeli soldiers hold secret conversations at night. Step by step, it becomes visible how it is determined within the army and intelligence services who is a target, what technologies and procedures are deployed, and how many civilian casualties an attack may cost. Dozens to sometimes hundreds of Palestinian civilians can thereby be considered an acceptable price for eliminating a single target. The film thus asks the painful question: how can the killing of innocent civilians become so normalized within a military apparatus that it is no longer seen as a moral or legal problem? The title refers to Nezek Agavi, ‘collateral damage’, the Israeli military term for the expected number of civilian casualties of an airstrike. The term thus symbolizes the dehumanization deeply embedded in the system: civilian deaths are not a tragic side effect, but a foreseen and accepted part of military operations. NAZA premiered at the Filmfestival van Venetië, where the film won Special Jury Prize.