By Sammy Gecsoyler

 

LONDON, 18 Oct. - (ANA) - Film’s executive producer talks about first time he watched film detailing Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza

The director Jonathan Glazer said he was “shocked into silence” the first time he watched NAZA, an award-winning documentary about Israel’s systems of mass killing in the war on Gaza.

 

Glazer appeared on a panel at NAZA’s UK premiere in London on Thursday night alongside key figures behind the documentary, including its Israeli co-directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.

 

Since the film’s release, the Israeli government has denounced it and pursued those involved, announcing plans aimed at stripping citizenship from Abraham and Szor, who government ministers have accused of treason.

 

Responding to questions from the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, who chaired the event, Glazer, who is an executive producer on the film, said he was “shocked into silence” the first time he watched NAZA, which is produced by the Guardian.

 

“It wasn’t really a question for me of getting involved once Yuval and Rachel had asked me to,” he said. “Partly because of the power of the testimonies. But also the filmmaking: the way they had presented those testimonies was cinematic and eloquent in terms of form.”

 

He noted that NAZA was “clearly in dialogue” with and “deals with very similar themes” to The Zone of Interest, the 2023 historical drama he directed and that depicted the mundane daily lives of Nazi officers overseeing the extermination of Jews at Auschwitz.

 

“Both films deal with dehumanisation,” Glazer said. “And how we get to where we do as a species by othering and dehumanising, and what that then leads to.”

 

Asked whether he was surprised by the intense reaction of the Israeli government to NAZA, Glazer replied: “We had conversations before the film about what Yuval and Rachel were anticipating. But certainly from my point of view [the reaction] was much more venal than I thought it was going to be.”

 

Glazer’s long-time collaborator, James Wilson, who was a producer on NAZA, made similar remarks at the BFI London Film Festival earlier this month. Wilson condemned the “hysterical, vituperative, aggressive backlash from members of the Israeli government and Israeli politicians.”

 

Expanding on those comments on Thursday, Wilson noted how the Israeli government reaction occurred before anyone in the country had even seen the film. He said while the response in Israel makes him “angry” he believes it reveals something about “perpetrator psyche”. “When confronted by reality, it’s the rage of cognitive dissonance.”

 

Abraham said the film allows viewers to look at the “mechanisms that allow human beings to do this to other human beings”, and Szor said the idea to shoot footage looking inside Tel Aviv citizens’ apartments was to focus on the “ritual” of people gathering around the TV to watch the “news and to see the absence or justification” of the devastation happening in Gaza.

 

She said she and Abraham began recording interviews before they had begun thinking about the form or visual language of the film. “We thought this is our responsibility as Israelis who have access to [soldiers and officers involved in the war in Gaza] to try to just record those interviews.”

 

Paul Lewis, the Guardian’s head of investigations, and an executive producer on NAZA, said many other Israeli journalists would not have done this work because of the risks. He said of Abraham and Szor: “They deserve a huge plaudit from everyone for their courage. There is a cost to them both. The response from the Israeli government is absolutely appalling. No-one who works as a filmmaker or a journalist should be punished for an exercise in telling the truth.”

 

NAZA is in UK cinemas and will be shown in more than 50 countries. As well as its global cinema releases, NAZA will be available free on the Guardian’s website from late November. When the film opened in Italy last month, it surpassed the Marvel movie Avengers Endgame: Encore to open at No 1.

 

The film contains 24 interviews with Israeli military insiders who detail how an AI-assisted apparatus of mass surveillance was activated during the Gaza war, revealing the systems that were used to target Hamas operatives in the knowledge that large numbers of Palestinian civilians would also die.

 

Various bodies, including the UN, Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, the latter two of which are Israeli-based, have said Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

 

The film premiered at the Venice film festival, where it was met with a 25-minute standing ovation – a festival record. The documentary went on to win the special jury prize.

 

Israeli government officials have attempted to discredit NAZA’s content, while far-right activists have threatened to hunt down the directors.

 

The Israel Defense Forces’ chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, has said they will use “every tool at our disposal” against the film, while the military has issued a 10-page response to NAZA, which was based on interviews with more than 100 sources with knowledge of the military systems used in the war.

 

Demonstrators have gathered outside the home of Szor’s parents, demanding that she face the death penalty, and a mural depicting the film-makers through the sights of a gun appeared in the Israeli city of Ashdod.

 

Szor and Abraham addressed the backlash to their documentary at a Q&A after its New York premiere. “Our country is doing so much to hide these systems,” Szor told the audience. “It’s not a world that is open even to the Israeli public.”

 

The Zone of Interest won the Oscar for best international film in 2024.   - (ANA) -

 

AB/ANA/18 October 2026 - - -