by Mark Demetrius
Worth: $15.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Yuval Abraham
Intro:
… even more horrifying than you might expect from its subject matter.
Directed by Israeli filmmakers and produced by The Guardian, this documentary is even more horrifying than you might expect from its subject matter. Shot at night on Tel Aviv rooftops, it consists predominantly of interviews with disillusioned Israeli intelligence officers and reveals the details and system behind the mass killing of people in Gaza. The attacks generally occur at night, when the targets tend to be at home and asleep. Or at least the families of targets tend to be as the targets themselves are often away and at work. And at least 15 per cent of them are not Hamas anyway, but it’s still deemed preferable to keep letting AI select them … Since the monstrous October 7 attacks, the cumulative Palestinian death toll had passed 73,000.
Naza is full of factoids like that. Its title refers to the number of civilian deaths pre-approved to eliminate a single target. Another term used is the “Where’s Daddy?” system, which involves monitoring when suspected militants will return to their family home … Most of the revelations are delivered starkly and directly, and are all the more harrowing as a result. The interviewees’ appearance and voices were altered to protect anonymity — and avoid inevitable imprisonment.
Stats are one thing, and personal recollections are another. “You hack her phone and then kill her’’, says one of the interviewees — the ‘her’ in question being a 12-year-old girl. And even with most of their features obscured, and a ‘response’ of pure silence, you can’t miss the intense feelings of another interviewee when asked “How could you bomb when you heard a baby crying inside?”
For most of the time, the screen is dark and effectively monochrome, but there are occasional flashes of colour, providing glimpses of domestic life inside flats. Another one occurs right at the end – a clip from a very old TV interview with Benjamin Netanyahu. He was promoting a book that he’d written about terrorism, which he defined as “the deliberate and systematic targeting of non-combatants to create fear for political objectives’’.
