‘NAZA’ to have a special premiere screening
The Venice Film Festival award-winning ‘NAZA’ to have a special premiere screening at Sofia DocuMental
Less than a month after its world premiere, followed by a 25-minute standing ovation and the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival, “NAZA” will be screened for the first time in Bulgaria at a special screening as part of Sofia DocuMental.
On 5 October at 6.30 pm at the House of Cinema, the Bulgarian premiere of ‘NAZA’ will take place as a special highlight in the programme of this year’s seventh edition of Sofia DocuMental, the documentary film festival focusing on human rights. Filmed at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, the film by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Shore reveals in detail the mechanisms behind Israel’s deliberate mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Less than a month ago at the Venice Film Festival, the film – produced by The Guardian and JW Films – was awarded the Special Jury Prize, whilst the festival audience gave the crew a standing ovation lasting a record 25 minutes.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Shore’s previous project – ‘No Other Land’ – was screened for the first time in Bulgaria as part of the fifth edition of Sofia DocuMental in 2024. In it, the two directors, together with Basel Adra and Hamdan Balal, documented how the army demolishes Palestinian homes to paint a broader picture of the system of occupation and ethnic supremacy aimed at the displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank.
In NAZA, through the testimonies of soldiers and intelligence officers, Abraham and Shor once again seek to describe the wider military system used to carry out what the UN Commission and leading international human rights organisations have defined as genocide. The film does not focus on sporadic war crimes committed by disobedient soldiers, but on the orders, policies and established practices themselves, as well as the language and logic that make these practices possible. NAZA examines the system and its cogs.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor themselves say of the film:
We made this film driven by a sense of duty to use our position as Israelis to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians, for which our country bears responsibility. Over the past three years, whilst filming, we have grappled with the same questions that our grandparents’ generation asked themselves, and which have remained relevant throughout the 20th century: how does one group of people allow the complete dehumanisation of another? What does the workings of such a system look like from the inside?
Many of the revelations in the film were published almost as soon as we learnt of them, in the months following the attacks of 7 October, by The Guardian (one of NAZA’s producers), in collaboration with our reporting partners +972 Magazine and Local Call. The film allows us to explore something more deeply than we could through investigative journalism alone: not only the words that are spoken, but also those that are left unsaid – the silence. It is up to all of us to break that silence.
The screening is being organised in partnership with the distribution company Pro8 Film Distribution, and further screenings in other cities across the country will be announced. Tickets can be purchased at the box office of the House of Cinema, as well as online. For further information, please visit the festival’s website at documental.bg.