Naza Breaks Venice’s Standing-O Meter

Multiple outlets are reporting a record-breaking standing ovation for Naza, the new documentary from No Other Land’s Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, in Venice. Naza features interviews with Israeli intelligence members about the “systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza,” according to its official synopsis. At the Venice Film Festival, the film received 24.5 minutes of unbroken applause and audience members waving Palestinian flags, according to Variety. Deadline added another 30 seconds to clock a round 25 minutes. This breaks the previous record for a standing ovation at the festival, which was somewhere between 21 and 23 minutes for The Voice of Hind Rajab last year. It also beats the longest standing ovation ever reported: 22 minutes for Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth in 2006 at Cannes.

Abraham and Szor co-directed No Other Land with Palestinian filmmakers Hamdan Ballal and Basel Adra. Adra and Abraham accepted the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film in March of last year. Weeks later, Ballal was arrested by the Israeli military. “Even though our movie received global recognition, I felt I had failed — we had failed — in our attempt to make life better here,” he said after his release.

Abraham and Szor told Variety they felt obligated to use their access to make Naza “to look at that system as it carried out what all human-rights organizations are saying is a genocide.” The film’s title comes from the term for every nontargeted individual killed in a targeted strike. “One officer recalls blowing up a building with 500 people in it to go after one target. They admit to knowingly wiping out entire neighborhoods, fully aware of the catastrophic human toll. These were not outliers, or accidents, or isolated incidents,” Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri writes in his review. “The murders were, again, part of a system. ‘Do you think it’s a genocide?’ Abraham asks one of his subjects. ‘Yes, absolutely’ is the response.”