Festivals live and die by manufactured buzz, but sometimes a project arrives that strips away the glitter entirely. At the 83rd Venice International Film Festival, a new documentary named NAZA didn't just screen—it paralyzed the room.
When the credits rolled, the auditorium erupted into a staggering 25-minute continuous standing ovation. That figure breaks records, eclipsing the emotional reception given to The Voice of Hind Rajab just a year prior. Red carpet onlookers shouted competing slogans of "Free Palestine!" and "Free Israel!", highlighting the raw nerve the project hit before anyone even took their seats.
Directed by Oscar winners Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the 80-minute feature pulls back the curtain on something far more clinical than traditional war reporting: automated, algorithm-driven warfare.
Inside the Factory of Automated Warfare
If you want to understand why NAZA commands this level of attention, you have to look at the mechanics behind its creation. The title itself comes from an internal military acronym used to quantify expected civilian casualties—shorthand for collateral damage.
Abraham and Szor spent three years building their investigation in secret. Working quietly on rooftops across Tel Aviv under the cover of night, they interviewed 24 Israeli military intelligence officers and soldiers. To protect their lives, the subjects appear with digitally altered voices and obscured faces.
These insiders describe an operational reality that sounds like science fiction turned administrative horror. Targets weren't hand-picked by human commanders agonizing over individual decisions. Instead, artificial intelligence systems ingested massive streams of data—including information scraped from thousands of hacked mobile phones—to generate kill lists on an industrial scale.
"It was done on a mass scale, like a factory," one anonymous source notes in the film. Another compares the physical detachment of the targeting process to playing a video game, where coordinates feed into automated systems and structural destruction follows with terrifying velocity.
Why This Israeli Perspective Changes the Conversation
You might wonder how two Israeli filmmakers managed to secure access to military insiders willing to break rank. Abraham and Szor addressed this directly during their packed Venice press conference. Because they belong to Israeli society, they possessed a unique insider track to the individuals operating the machinery from the inside.
Rather than relying purely on external footage or secondhand estimates, the directors sat down with the practitioners and asked a painfully simple question: Sketch it for us; describe step-by-step what you actually did.
By letting soldiers and intelligence operatives explain the mechanics of automated targeting in their own words, the film strips away political rhetoric. It forces viewers to confront the raw bureaucracy of modern killing. The documentary builds on investigative reporting published between 2023 and 2025 by outlets like The Guardian, 972 Magazine, and Local Call, but translates dry journalistic data into visceral human testimony.
The Festival Circuit and Political Pressure
Venice has a history of turning politically charged cinema into major cultural flashpoints. Last year's runner-up favorite, The Voice of Hind Rajab, brought a similar wave of emotional reckoning to the Lido. With American actress and filmmaker Maggie Gyllenhaal leading the jury this year, and Tunisian director Kaouther Ben Hania—creator of last year's Gaza-focused drama—sitting alongside her as a juror, NAZA stands as a clear frontrunner for the festival's Golden Lion award.
Yet, focusing solely on award speculation misses the broader cultural impact. Standing ovations at major festivals are frequently scrutinized for being theatrical or manipulated by publicists. Even so, a continuous wall of applause lasting nearly half an hour signals that a film has pierced through festival fatigue. It leaves an audience physically unable to look away, turning a quiet theater into a pressure cooker of collective discomfort.
When the festival wraps up and the juried prizes are handed out, the conversation around algorithmic warfare will outlive the red carpet. NAZA forces a brutal reckoning with how automation is reshaping combat, proving that the scariest part of modern technology isn't just what it can calculate—it's how easily human beings can step back and let the machine pull the trigger.
