In a sentenceMen in the dark, above a city with its lights on, explaining the arithmetic
Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist, sits on rooftops in Tel Aviv at night and talks to men who served in Israeli military intelligence during the war in Gaza. Their faces are kept in shadow and their names are withheld. Below and behind them the city is lit and going about its evening. The men describe how targets were chosen, how surveillance fed the choosing, how much of it was automated, and how many deaths beside the intended one were considered acceptable. Abraham asks short questions and lets them answer. Between interviews, Rachel Szor’s camera cuts from the calm of the Israeli night to what the same weeks looked like in Gaza. Abraham and Szor direct and edit together; James Wilson, Lindsay Poulton and Harry Davies produce.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor put Israeli intelligence officers on a rooftop at night, hide their faces and let them explain how Gaza was targeted. It is journalism first and cinema second, and we found it as frightening as anything we have watched in years.
Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor have made a small, cold and direct film. It is 80 minutes long. Most of it is people talking, on rooftops in Tel Aviv, after dark, with their faces hidden. The people are men who served in Israeli military intelligence during the war in Gaza, and what they talk about is how the killing was organised. It is a piece of journalism that happens to be a film, and it is a better film than that description suggests. We recommend it, with the plain warning that it is hard to sit through.
Szor shoots the interviews so that the speakers are in shadow and the city behind them is not. Windows are lit, roads have traffic on them, the skyline looks like any prosperous place on a warm night. The men are safe, in the dark, above all of it, and the place they are describing is a short drive away and has been flattened. Szor and Abraham cut between the two often enough that the contrast stops being a device and becomes the argument: this is where the decisions were taken, and that is where they landed. It is a simple idea and it is the right one.
The substance is the systems. The men explain how surveillance was gathered, how lists of targets were produced by software rather than by people, how a person’s home was chosen as the place to hit him, and how many others in the building were considered a fair price. We were horrified, which we expected. What we did not expect was how quickly horror gave way to something colder, because the men are not boasting and they are not confessing. They are describing a procedure, in the tone you would use to explain a filing system, and the procedure ended in a great many dead children. That flatness is what stayed with us, more than any single image from Gaza.
Abraham is on camera as himself and he is a good interviewer, which is not the same as a warm one. He asks short questions, waits, and does not help. When a man reaches for a justification Abraham lets him finish it and then asks the next thing. As editors, he and Szor keep the pace even; nothing is hurried and nothing is padded, and 80 minutes is exactly as long as this needed to be. There is no score to speak of and the film is better for it.
There are problems, and they are the problems of the method. The anonymity that protects the speakers also stops us reading them. A face in an interview tells you when a man is lying to himself, and we have only voices and silhouettes here, so we take a great deal on trust. The film knows this and does not solve it. There are also stretches, mostly in the middle third, where it plays like an investigation being read aloud rather than a film being made: a fact, a corroboration, another fact. And the rooftop set-up, so strong the first few times, is used until it becomes a template.
Set against the documentaries it will be compared to, it is a strange hybrid. The Gatekeepers (2012) had retired intelligence chiefs speaking on the record, with their names and their regrets. The Act of Killing (2012) had killers performing their crimes for the camera and enjoying it. NAZA has neither the names nor the performance. Its men are recent, unremarkable and unrepentant in the mildest possible way, and that is a newer and worse thing to watch than either.
Watch it at home, alone, with nothing planned afterwards. It is short and you will not want to talk to anyone for a while.
The reviews are unanimous in their approval. Nearly every critic reaches for the word essential, or something close to it, and most describe the film as devastating or unsettling. The praise clusters on the interviews: anonymous Israeli intelligence officers filmed in shadow on rooftops, speaking about targeting and killing in Gaza with a plainness critics find more chilling than any argument. Several also admire the contrast between ordinary Tel Aviv nightlife and the ruins across the border, and the restraint of the filmmaking as a whole.
The spread is narrow, and the reservations are matters of degree rather than dissent. The Guardian is uneasy about the anonymity of the sources; Little White Lies finds the film less sure of itself when it tries to be more than an extension of the filmmakers’ journalism; The Playlist thinks one visual device does not land. The Hollywood Reporter adds that the accounts of mass killing leave the viewer in despair. Nobody argues the film is dishonest, only that its methods raise questions it does not fully answer.
The critic condemns the conduct depicted as devastating and damning. The review singles out the documentary’s account of Israeli military actions in Gaza.
Read the full review →The critic calls the documentary an essential, deeply unsettling account of the mechanics of genocide. They praise its shadowy rooftop interviews and striking visual form for illuminating the subjects’ contradictions and banal evils.
Read the full review →Ebiri calls the documentary a bombshell and an essential, deeply unsettling account of systematic violence. He praises its spare, artful visual approach, especially the contrast between Tel Aviv’s ordinary nighttime life and Gaza’s devastation.
Read the full review →Mintzer calls the film a brave, indispensable act of bearing witness, though its accounts of mass killing leave a sense of despair. He praises its sober, thoroughly documented interviews with IDF intelligence officers, which expose the systems and attitudes behind the killings.
Read the full review →Brody regards the documentary as a powerful artistic and moral achievement. He praises its restrained visual form and the way its interviews turn testimony into an act of witness.
Read the full review →Friedberg calls the documentary an overwhelming and vital work of investigative journalism. He praises its chilling portrayal of how Israeli military systems and personnel enable mass killing in Gaza.
Read the full review →
No Other Land · not reviewed yetAbraham and Szor’s earlier film, angrier and warmer, made from the other side of the wall.
The Gatekeepers · not reviewed yetSix former Shin Bet chiefs, on the record, saying what they now think they did.
The Act of KillingIndonesian death squad veterans restage their murders as musicals; the banality made theatrical.
The Fog of WarRobert McNamara alone with a camera, still not quite admitting it.
The Sorrow and the Pity · not reviewed yetOccupied France, interviewed twenty-five years on; ordinary people explaining what they went along with.
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