'NAZA,' a Gaza Bombing Documentary from Oscar-Winning Directors, Added to New York Film Festival Slate

The 2026 New York Film Festival has added the North American premiere of NAZA to its main slate, giving a prominent autumn berth to a documentary shot from Tel Aviv rooftops that examines Israel's bombing of Gaza. The film gets its world premiere first at the Venice Film Festival before crossing the Atlantic for New York. The Hollywood Reporter

NAZA was directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, the filmmaking pair behind No Other Land, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The new film is produced by The Guardian alongside James Wilson and Jonathan Glazer, the Oscar-winning filmmakers behind The Zone of Interest. The documentary builds on investigative reporting from The Guardian, Israeli-Palestinian publication +972 Magazine, and Hebrew-language outlet Local Call.

The title carries its own weight. "NAZA" is a military acronym used within Israeli intelligence to denote the expected number of civilian casualties in a given airstrike — a figure calculated before a strike is authorised. The filmmakers say the documentary reveals in detail the systems behind what they describe as Israel's calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. New York Film Festival artistic director Dennis Lim called the film "an important investigative documentary about one of the gravest catastrophes of our time."

The festival itself runs from 25 September through 12 October, opening with the North American premiere of Paper Tiger and featuring world premieres of Behemoth!, 14th, and Godzilla Minus Zero. Film at Lincoln Center, the festival's organiser, confirmed the NAZA addition on its official NYFF64 page. Tickets go on sale to the general public on 15 September; memberships purchased by 28 August secure pre-sale access.

The programmers' pick pairs filmmakers who have already proven their pull on the awards circuit — Abraham and Szor with an Oscar, Glazer with an Oscar-nominated feature that turned the Holocaust into a study of moral adjacency. Festival slots for NAZA at both Venice and New York place the film squarely in the autumn corridor where documentaries built for awards consideration typically surface, and where distributors and acquisitions teams do their sharpest watching.

For audiences, the festival run means the film reaches cinema screens before any streaming or wider release is announced.