‘NAZA’ Opens in U.S. Theaters Today — the Gaza Documentary That Skipped the Distributors Entirely

NEW YORK — FRIDAY, OCTOBER 9, 2026 — The most talked-about documentary of the fall does not have a distributor, did not wait for one, and opens in theaters across America starting today anyway. NAZA, the new film from Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — two of the directors behind the Oscar-winning No Other Land — begins its wider U.S. theatrical rollout on Friday, expanding from its New York launch into Los Angeles and other markets. It is an 80-minute film built around testimony from 24 anonymized Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers about the systems behind Israel's bombing of Gaza, and it is being released the same way its directors' last film was: by themselves, because nobody else would touch it.

01 What you're actually watching

NAZA is not a film of press conferences and pundits. Almost all of it takes place at night, on rooftops in Tel Aviv, where Abraham sits across from one disillusioned soldier or intelligence officer at a time. The locations and the hour are chosen for secrecy: the interviewees' faces are kept in shadow, their names are withheld, and their voices have been digitally altered to protect them from their own government. Behind them, the city carries on, lit up and apparently oblivious, while co-director Szor's camera catches reflections in glass towers and news clips flickering on apartment televisions.

What the 24 whistleblowers describe, according to the filmmakers, is the machinery of the Gaza war: the AI-powered surveillance and targeting systems used to select targets, how the expected number of civilian deaths was calculated before airstrikes, and how the decisions to strike were actually made. The film builds on investigative reporting published between 2023 and 2025 in The Guardian — which also produced the documentary — +972 Magazine, and the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call. In one instance described in coverage of the film, a source says troops were given approval to kill as many as 500 people to take out a single target. The film does not ask you to take its word for any of this. It asks you to listen to the people who say they were in the room.

02 The title tells you everything

NAZA takes its name from an Israeli military acronym — used euphemistically inside the intelligence apparatus to indicate how many civilians are expected to die in an airstrike. "Collateral damage," rendered as a bureaucratic abbreviation. The filmmakers have said the title is the thesis: this is a film about what happens when the anticipated death of civilians stops being a tragedy and becomes a variable in a targeting equation. It is a grim title for a grim subject, and it is doing a lot of work before the film even starts.

It is worth sitting with how unusual this framing is for an American theatrical release. Documentaries about ongoing wars usually arrive years later, with the benefit of archives and distance. NAZA is arriving while the war it documents is still being fought, built from testimony given in secret, in the dark, by people who say they cannot show their faces. That urgency is the whole point — and it is also why the film has been controversial since long before any American audience could see it.

03 Venice, New York, and a protest

The film's festival run has been electric. NAZA premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where it won the Special Jury Prize and received a reported 25-minute standing ovation — the kind of reception that turns a hard-sell documentary into an event. Its North American premiere followed at the New York Film Festival, and that is where the other half of the story started: a pro-Israel protest gathered outside the premiere, and Israeli media coverage has included sharp criticism of the film's context and framing. The directors have said the film is intended to reach Americans who should examine U.S. military support for Israel, and Israelis who have stayed silent about the war.

The reception has not been confined to festivals. In Italy, the film's rollout turned into a genuine phenomenon — it topped the Italian box office, outperforming even a re-release of Avengers: Endgame, with cinemas extending its run as demand kept growing. Distributors there described an audience that skewed far beyond the usual documentary crowd: people of all ages who, in the words of one cinema owners' association president, knew what they were going to see and came anyway. That is the audience every political documentary dreams of and almost none gets.

04 The release with no distributor

Here is the part of the story that the film industry will be studying for years. NAZA has no conventional American distributor. None acquired it. So Abraham and Szor are doing what they did with No Other Land — which also reached U.S. theaters through independent distribution before winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature — and releasing it themselves, with The Guardian and the international sales company mk2 spearheading the American rollout alongside U.S. partners and consultants. The film opened September 30 at New York's IFC Center, where two opening-night screenings sold out, and expands to Los Angeles and additional markets starting October 9, ahead of a full national rollout.

The endgame is even more aggressive: after the theatrical run plays out across more than 50 countries, The Guardian will post the entire film for free on its website in mid-November. Theaters first, then free to the entire planet. It is a distribution strategy that treats the theatrical run as the launch event and the internet as the actual audience — and for a film this contested, it is arguably the only strategy that makes sense. No distributor has to be brave. The filmmakers just have to be.

05 Why they made it — and what it has cost them

Abraham and Szor are not newcomers to this fight. They were two of the four directors of No Other Land, the 2024 documentary about the West Bank that fought its own uphill battle for American distribution before winning the 2025 Oscar. NAZA is, in a sense, the second half of the same argument: where the last film documented the occupation's machinery in the West Bank, this one documents the war's machinery in Gaza, through the people who operated it.

The backlash has been extraordinary and personal. Israel's prime minister has condemned the film, and the directors have faced escalating threats from Israeli officials to strip them of their citizenship for making it — threats they addressed directly at the North American premiere. Their parents have been threatened. This is the context in which the film's interviewees hide their faces, and it is also the context in which the film will be debated: not as an abstract policy argument, but as testimony from people who say they participated in the systems it describes and can no longer stay quiet about them. NYFF has been a launching pad all week — from Rami Malek's career-best turn to the Mara sisters sharing the screen — but nothing else in the lineup arrives with this much weight behind it.

06 How to see it

NAZA expands to Los Angeles and additional U.S. markets starting Friday, October 9, with a national rollout to follow — check local arthouse listings, because this is the kind of release that lives or dies on word of mouth and sold-out opening weekends. If theaters are not your thing, or the film does not reach your city, the wait is short: The Guardian will stream the entire film free on its website in mid-November, in what is shaping up to be one of the most widely seen documentary releases of the year. However you watch it, you will not be watching alone.