Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham's Documentary NAZA Draws 25-Minute Venice Ovation

Israeli filmmakers Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham directed NAZA, a documentary produced by The Guardian that received 25 minutes of standing ovations in Venice. In the film, 24 Israeli insiders describe how an AI system turned houses in Gaza into targets. On a darkened rooftop in Tel Aviv, Israeli intelligence personnel explain the details of their work, recounting their part in developing an AI mapping tool that searched for cellphone signals and proposed residential buildings in the Gaza Strip as bombing targets. The men acknowledge indirectly that they bear responsibility for thousands of deaths, yet they never spoke out because that was not their job. "My role is technical," says one. "I'm just a small cog in the machine," says another. The documentary confronts the question of why these insiders chose to speak now, and the answers Szor and Abraham give are described as disturbing. The film is framed as a chilling account of a system in which human operators hear babies crying and nonetheless order another strike.