Israel‘s Culture Minister has said he will work to revoke the citizenship of Oscar-winning filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor over their new documentary, NAZA.
Writing on X, Zohar described the film as “vile,” saying it “constitutes treason.”
The documentary, which won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, features testimony from 24 Israeli military officers outlining the systems and protocols they allege Israel uses to target and kill civilians in Gaza. The film’s title, NAZA, comes from an acronym the Israeli military uses as a shorthand for civilian casualties.
“This is exactly the reason I led the important reform in cinema so that Israeli citizens will no longer have to pay out of their own pockets for the harm to IDF soldiers and the State of Israel,” Zohar wrote, referring to his recent reforms of government funding for the Israeli film industry.
NAZA, like the documentary No Other Land, directed by Zohar and Abraham together with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, did not receive any Israeli public funding. NAZA was produced in part with support from British newspaper The Guardian.
In his acceptence speech in Venice, Abraham commented on “all the people — the Israeli politicians, the journalists back home — who are now attacking this film, denying it, without even seeing it,” adding that “the truth” of civilian killings in Gaza “has been documented and is known from the very first day, thanks to Palestinian journalists, [and] more than 200 [journalists] have been killed in Gaza by the Israelis; their voices were silenced and denied.”
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, Abraham said NAZA does not yet have distribution in Israel, but he said the filmmakers’ intention was to “release it as widely as possible in Israel, and in the United States, and Germany,” the two nations which are the leading suppliers of arms to Israel. Szor said the soliders and officers in the documentary “spoke in Hebrew so that more Israelis will hear about [what they did in Gaza].”
This isn’t the first time the Israeli culture minister has taken aim at filmmakers. When No Other Land won the Oscar for best cocumentary last year, Zohar called it “a sad moment for the world of cinema.” No Other Land was not commercially released in Israeli or Palestinian cinemas. The producers posted it for free online.
Earlier this year, the culture minister overhauled Israel’s film financing system, shifting public money away from independent or arthouse projects that address sensitive political issues towards films with more commercial box-office potential. Zohar has referred to the reforms as transfering “our money from films that Israel haters love to films that Israelis love,” saying they marked an “end of the era where Israeli soldiers are blackened at the expense of Israeli citizens.”
Zohar stepped up the reform plans after The Sea, a drama centered on a Palestinian boy, won best picture at last year’s Ophir Awards, Israel’s highest film honor, and was submitted as the country’s entry for the Oscars.
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