NAZA asks what becomes visible when a documentary examines the decisions behind civilian deaths in Gaza. Mahmoud Mushtaha’s response connects its account of killing to the experience of a Palestinian viewer. That encounter raises the film’s central critical question: can looking closely at those who exercise power help audiences understand the people subjected to it? [Mushtaha’s commentary](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/sep/17/naza-film-documentary-killing-gaza).
Content note: This analysis discusses the documentary’s premise, formal choices, and selected reported dialogue, including accounts of civilian killing. It draws on published film materials and reporting rather than a firsthand screening.
What NAZA investigates
Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, NAZA is an 80-minute documentary built around nighttime conversations on Tel Aviv rooftops. Its title refers to a military acronym used to express the anticipated civilian deaths associated with an airstrike. The film’s organizing subject is therefore a decision-making process: how human lives become part of an operational calculation. These credits, the setting, and the title’s meaning are documented in [Close Up’s film description](https://closeupinitiative.org/film/naza/).
That premise calls for a different approach from a conventional character review. The people speaking are documentary participants, not fictional protagonists whose motivations can be supplied by a screenplay. Their explanations deserve close attention, but their access to information does not automatically make them reliable interpreters of their own conduct.
For viewers, the useful distinction is between learning how a process operates and accepting how its participants justify it. An interview can provide evidence about the first while revealing evasions in the second. NAZA’s subject makes that distinction especially consequential: procedural fluency can sound authoritative even when the procedure itself is what requires scrutiny.
The interviewee is a witness, not automatically a hero
The filmmakers’ press notes identify 24 military and intelligence interviewees whose appearances and voices were digitally altered to protect their identities. They also explain that the documentary deliberately limits its exploration of the sources’ remorse and personal motivations. Its focus remains on the actions and systems being described. [NAZA’s official press notes](https://www.folketsbio.se/app/uploads/2026/09/nazapresspackv3.pdf).
That is a meaningful editorial choice. A familiar documentary structure takes someone who has participated in wrongdoing, follows their troubled conscience, and arrives at disclosure as a moment of redemption. Such a structure can quietly relocate the emotional center of the story. The audience begins waiting for the speaker to feel better, while those harmed become supporting evidence in someone else’s moral development.
My view is that testimony should not carry that automatic reward. Speaking may serve a public purpose without settling the question of responsibility. A viewer can recognize the value of information while remaining unsatisfied with the person providing it. Those responses are compatible.
Two short lines expose a struggle over responsibility
In his published account of the film, Sight and Sound critic Nicolas Rapold records an interviewee saying, “Gaza becomes like a factory of targets.” He also reports Abraham’s response when another participant says he can no longer continue his work: “You already did.” [Sight and Sound’s review](https://www.bfi.org.uk/sight-and-sound/reviews/naza-essential-documentary-from-co-directors-no-other-land-lays-bare-machinery-killing-gaza).
The first line places production at the center of the speaker’s description. A factory is organized around output; individual units become interchangeable. Applied to people, that vocabulary reveals how a task can be understood through efficiency while its human consequences recede.
The second line interrupts a possible escape into the future. A decision to stop may matter, but it cannot rewrite completed actions. Read together, the remarks expose the distance between describing an institution and answering for participation in it. Their force lies in their plainness: neither requires an elaborate speech to make that distance apparent.
Why the nighttime setting matters
The rooftops place speech within an inhabited city rather than an abstract interview studio. My reading is that this setting creates an uneasy relationship between ordinary surroundings and extraordinary admissions. A city continues to function around a conversation that might unsettle the assumptions supporting that ordinary life.
Darkness also changes the viewer’s task. We generally expect a documentary to illuminate its subject, but illumination need not mean making every face identifiable. It can mean making relationships comprehensible: between an instruction and its consequences, between a technical description and the person it describes.
The distinction is worth holding onto. Atmospheric photography cannot establish whether an allegation is true. It can, however, shape how long viewers remain with a statement and how carefully they consider it. Form and evidence do different work, and strong criticism should evaluate both.
Keeping civilian lives at the center
A documentary organized around military insiders faces a structural problem: the people with access to the machinery of violence may also receive the most screen time. More access can produce more explanation without producing a proportionate understanding of those who suffer its consequences.
That is why character-focused criticism needs adjustment here. The question is not simply which speaker has the most compelling presence. It is whether the film’s distribution of attention helps viewers recognize lives beyond the speakers’ categories. A person does not become fully understood because an institution has classified them.
Our analysis of A Beautiful Mind and the limits of explanatory models considers how a persuasive framework can exceed what it actually explains. Here, that distinction has a specific ethical application: an operational description of a person is not an account of that person’s life.
The same care applies to attribution. The film’s allegations, the directors’ interpretation, a participant’s admission, and an independently established finding are different kinds of statements. Keeping them distinct strengthens a serious response to the documentary rather than reducing its urgency.
The deeper question: what should understanding change?
The most demanding way to approach NAZA is to resist treating comprehension as completion. Understanding a harmful process does not itself interrupt that process. Feeling disturbed does not establish what one has learned, and admiration for a documentary is not a measure of its real-world consequences.
For discussion after viewing, three questions offer a useful starting point: Where does a speaker acknowledge a choice? Where does institutional language make that choice harder to see? Whose experience remains outside the explanation being offered?
Those questions also belong to the spaces where films are screened. As our commentary on screening spaces and film culture explores, the room helps shape the encounter. For a documentary with this subject, thoughtful discussion should preserve the difference between appreciating filmmaking and addressing the actions it examines.
NAZA’s central critical challenge is to make systems intelligible without allowing the word “system” to erase individual agency. The strongest interpretation keeps both levels in view: institutions organize conduct, and people make decisions within them. A film can open that inquiry. Responsibility begins where explanation stops being an excuse.
Original content by this site's editorial team. Published: September 18, 2026 at 02:21:32 PDT (Los Angeles time)
