Expat cinema : NAZA

NAZA by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the makers of the Oscar-winning documentary No Other Land, is a revealing film about the systems behind the large-scale civilian casualties 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 the army and intelligence services determine who is a target, which technologies and procedures are deployed, and how many civilian casualties an attack is allowed to cost. Dozens to sometimes hundreds of Palestinian civilians can be considered an acceptable price for eliminating a single target. The film thus poses the painful question: how can the killing of innocent civilians become so normalized within a military apparatus that it is no longer viewed 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 from an airstrike. The term thus symbolizes the dehumanization deeply ingrained in the system: civilian deaths are not a tragic side effect, but a foreseen and accepted part of military operations. NAZA premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where the film won the Special Jury Prize.