‘This should be condemned by any thinking human’: film industry rallies behind NAZA directors

Film industry heavyweights across the globe have expressed solidarity with Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the Oscar-winning Israeli directors of documentary NAZA, who have been threatened with having their citizenship revoked by Israel’s culture minister, who accused them of “treason against the state”.

NAZA, which was produced by the Guardian, is named for an acronym euphemistically used by Israel’s intelligence service to indicate how many civilians it expects to die in an airstrike on Gaza. It includes interviews with 24 Israeli military or intelligence soldiers and officers who outlined the AI-powered targeting systems used to bombard Gaza, resulting in the mass killing of Palestinian civilians.

The film builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and the Guardian between 2023 and 2025.

The 80-minute documentary won the special jury prize at this year’s Venice film festival on Saturday, after receiving a 25-minute standing ovation – a festival record. On Sunday, Israel’s culture minister, Miki Zohar, accused the directors of being willing to “harm their homeland in order to receive applause from antisemites around the world”.

“I will act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators for treason against the state,” Zohar wrote on X.

Representatives for Venice, or the jury headed by Maggie Gyllenhaal, have not yet commented on these threats, but the artistic director of the Telluride film festival – widely acknowledged as the foremost Oscars launchpad – was swift to voice her outrage.

“Documentary film-makers are among the best long-form journalists working and critical to our understanding of the world,” said Julie Huntsinger. “To even threaten their citizenship standing is unacceptable. This should be condemned by any thinking human.”

Her words were echoed by the heads of the Locarno film festival, who said they stood “firmly in support of film-makers’ right to pursue difficult and urgent subjects without fear of reprisal. Artistic and journalistic freedom are the very foundation of what cinema can be: a space for dialogue which engages critically with the world we live in.”

They added that they “reaffirm our support for film-makers who ask difficult questions and help us reflect”.

NAZA will screen at the San Sebastián film festival next week. In a statement, its festival directors said the film “exposes the systematic genocide of the Palestinian people by the Israeli government” and that they stand “in solidarity” with the film’s makers as well as “the Palestinian people”. The documentary will show at the Bologna film festival tonight, before its North American premiere, at the New York film festival, later this month.

Tricia Tuttle, director of the Berlin film festival, said: “Artists must be free to critically examine the world. Films can provoke discussion, disagreement and criticism, but in a democratic society, the response to art must be dialogue and scrutiny, not intimidation or punishment by the state. Our team at the Berlinale stands with Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor and all artists who exercise these rights.”

Abraham and Szor won the documentary Oscar in 2025 for No Other Land, about Israeli settler violence in the occupied West Bank, alongside their Palestinian co-directors Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. That film premiered at Berlin the previous year, where it won a prize. Following this victory, Abraham’s family home was targeted by a rightwing mob. “For me, that was the worst moment of all,” he told the Guardian last week. “My mum is hoping it doesn’t happen again.”

Earlier this year, Tuttle’s position came under threat after several prize winners condemned Israel’s actions against Palestinians from the stage at the closing night awards gala. In the wake of this, the German culture minister, Wolfram Weimer, convened a crisis meeting as the Bild tabloid reported Tuttle was to be fired over giving “hate speech” an airing. In response, hundreds of prominent film-makers worldwide, including from Israel, rallied around Tuttle.

In Israel, more than 1,500 film-makers have signed a petition in support of the directors, and refuting the accusation that they have sought to damage the country’s image internationally.

Signatories include film-makers Liran Atzmor, one of the petition’s initiators, Nadav Lapid, Orna Ben Dor, Netalie Braun, Rani Blair, Hagai Levi, Shai Carmeli-Pollak and Shlomi Elkabetz.

The petition calls on those who support freedom of expression and artistic freedom to stand in solidarity with Abraham and Szor.

“In recent days, we have witnessed an unprecedented campaign of vilification and incitement against the film’s creators,” it says, warning that the rhetoric was moving increasingly close to “effectively sanctioning violence” and posed a physical threat to their lives.

So far the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences has not commented on the situation in which its recent winners find themselves. However, previous recipients of the documentary award have done so.

Laura Poitras, who won the documentary Oscar in 2015 for Citizenfour, about the WikiLeaks whistleblower Edward Snowden, defended the film’s factual credentials.

“The facts about the mass killing of civilians in NAZA have been reported by the Guardian in dozens of rigorously fact-checked articles, and every assertion in the film is based on multiple sources,” said Poitras, who acted as a consultant on NAZA.

She called the threats by Israeli government officials “a threat to journalists worldwide. They are also familiar – my reporting with the Guardian on the National Security Authority’s illegal global mass surveillance was met with similar denials and attacks by the US government.

“Despite the alarming nature of these current threats, it is important to emphasise that Israel has killed over 200 Palestinian journalists in Gaza and has normalised the murder of journalists.”

Meanwhile Nan Goldin, the US photographer and activist who worked with Poitras on the 2022 Oscar-nominated documentary All the Beauty and Bloodshed, said she applauded NAZA’s directors “for their enormous courage in presenting a film that shows irrefutable proof of Israel’s war crimes at their own great risk.”

British film industry veterans offering their support include director Richard Eyre, who said he was “beyond shocked by anything that the Israeli government does”, and the novelist and screenwriter Hanif Kureishi, who called the pair “both brave and admirable, standing up to state oppression, steadfast in their pursuit of the truth”.

Israeli attacks in Gaza since 2023 have killed more than 73,000 Palestinians, the majority of them civilians, and injured more than 174,000 others, together representing more than 10% of Gaza’s prewar population. Israel launched its war after the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attacks on Israel, when more than 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken to Gaza by militants. The majority of the dead and hostages were civilians.

Additional reporting by Andrew Pulver and Philip Oltermann

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