One of the most discussed films of the fall festival circuit is set to open in U.S. theaters next month — and without a traditional distributor.
“NAZA,” the new documentary from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, focuses on the Israeli military and includes interviews 24 whistleblowers about Israeli airstrikes in Gaza, is moving forward with an independent distribution strategy led by producers The Guardian and mk2. The film will arrive in theaters just weeks after its Venice premiere, as its timeliness is top of mind for its makers.
Following its North American premiere at the New York Film Festival on September 26, the film will open at the IFC Center on September 30, with an expansion into Los Angeles and other markets on October 9 and a wider rollout to follow.
While specifics of the distribution business model were not shared, a press release explained that The Guardian and MK2 have assembled “a team of U.S. and international partners and consultants to bring the film to audiences as quickly as possible” and promised that more information would be announced in the coming weeks.
The distribution plan ensures that “NAZA” will avoid the distribution challenges faced by Abraham and Szor’s previous documentary, “No Other Land.” That film, on which an ensemble of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers shared directing credits, dealt with similarly controversial subject matter about the Gaza war and struggled to find a distributor, despite premiering to critical acclaim.
“NAZA” received strong reviews from critics after premiering at the Venice International Film Festival, where it received the Special Jury Prize. It has unsurprisingly proved to be controversial already, with IDF chief of staff Eyal Zamir pledging to use “every tool at our disposal” to halt the film, while Benjamin Netanyahu has floated the idea of stripping interview subjects of their Israeli citizenship for sharing classified information.
“We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli filmmakers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible,” the filmmakers said in a statement. “While filming members of Israel’s military on rooftops at night in Tel Aviv over the past three years, we found ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents’ generation and throughout the 20th century: how does one group of people allow the total dehumanisation of another? What do the inner workings of such a system look like? Many of the revelations in the film were published almost immediately as we learned of them, in the months following the October 7th attacks, by The Guardian (one of ‘NAZA’s’ producers), in collaboration with reporting partners +972 Magazine and Local Call. The film lets us explore something deeper than we could in our investigative journalism alone: not only the words being said but also those that are not said, the silence. It is up to all of us to break that silence.”