I’ve been making documentaries for decades. My work has been Oscar-shortlisted, Emmy-nominated, acquired by outlets including Netflix and HBO, and honored at festivals around the world. I know this craft and industry well.
At our best, we shine light on stories that fall outside the news cycle, cultural fashion or marketplace demands. At our worst—and this is what I fear has happened to much of my industry—we become mouthpieces for ideological purity and emotionally packaged advocacy.
“NAZA,” the new documentary about the Israel Defense Forces’ AI-assisted war in Gaza by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, falls into the latter camp. The film premiered at the Venice Film Festival on Sept. 10 and was greeted by an ovation lasting roughly twenty-five minutes, the longest in the festival’s history. By some accounts, audience members waved Palestinian flags and chanted “Free Palestine.” Two days later, the film received Venice’s Special Jury Prize.
The previous record for the longest standing ovation was for the duo’s previous 2024 film, “No Other Land,” a searing indictment of … guess who? Yes, Israelis. That time, they were the “violent extremist settlers.” Twenty-five minutes of applause. Nearly one-third of the film’s own 80-minute running time.
You can imagine the audience rapt in their collective fervor, swept up in their own righteousness. Maybe some looked around, not wanting to be the first to sit down, knowing that doing so could make them appear insufficiently caring or loyal. The spectacle itself became a potent weapon: The longer the ovation lasted, the sharper the knife. Meanwhile, the filmmakers were ritually lauded as “brave” for indicting their own—for “speaking truth to power,” an opium of progressive culture.
Whether encouraged by festival staff or simply allowed to gather momentum, the ovation became something larger than spontaneous appreciation. It was public ceremony and performative display. Applause can also serve as a collective ritual, a visible demonstration that one stands with the group, its purpose, or its leader. The longer the ritual continues, the more conspicuous withdrawal becomes. Who dares be the first to sit?
The wordplay points in one direction and the loyalty ritual in another.
That ritual has a history. Under Stalin, whose regime became virulently anti-Zionist, extravagant applause was part of what scholars of Soviet political culture have described as public “loyalty rituals.” Stalin’s appearance, and sometimes merely the mention of his name, could produce prolonged standing ovations through which allegiance was publicly demonstrated. The performance made loyalty visible and disloyalty dangerous.
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn provided the most memorable illustration in The Gulag Archipelago. He described a Party conference at which an ovation for Stalin continued because nobody wanted to risk being the first person to stop. In his account, after 11 minutes, a factory director finally sat down; everyone instantly followed him, and the director was later arrested on another pretext. Once applause becomes a public demonstration of belonging, silence or non-participation becomes visible dissent.
The ritual is not unique to Stalin. Mao’s Cultural Revolution produced mass rallies in which hundreds of thousands, sometimes more than a million people, cheered and applauded for extended periods while proclaiming devotion to the chairman. Nazi political spectacle turned cheering, saluting, and chanting into choreographed demonstrations of allegiance. The regimes were radically different, but the ritual was the same: applause ceased to be merely a response and became a test of belonging—to ideologue and ideology alike.
Venice, in particular, has seen politically charged cinema embraced as moral and artistic transcendence before. In 1935, the festival honored Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” the Nazi Party’s monumental cinematic glorification of Hitler. Three years later, Venice awarded Riefenstahl’s “Olympia” the Mussolini Cup, then one of the festival’s highest honors. Prestigious cultural institutions are no more immune than anyone else to the orthodoxies of their time. They can mistake conformity for courage, political affirmation for artistic virtue, and collective enthusiasm for independent moral judgment. Venice has rewarded not only great auteurs, but the political currents of its time.
There is something inherently persuasive about hiding someone’s identity on screen.
“NAZA” itself is an Israeli military acronym derived from nezek agavi, Hebrew for “collateral damage,” including anticipated civilian harm associated with a strike. The title’s conspicuous resemblance to “Nazi” is difficult to dismiss as an afterthought. It is hard to imagine that the filmmakers never noticed the association. Before a single frame appears, the title has already begun framing the prosecution.
The title invites the specter of Nazism, yet the more revealing authoritarian echo may lie not in the film’s subject but in the spectacle surrounding its reception: the mass standing ovation, the public display of ideological allegiance, the reluctance to be the first to sit down, the ritualized affirmation of the prevailing moral line. The wordplay points in one direction and the loyalty ritual in another.
“NAZA” contains a second contradiction. The film presents nezek agavi as evidence of a cold bureaucratic machinery of killing, particularly through the IDF’s use of AI-assisted targeting systems. But the very existence of such calculations also complicates the film’s thesis. A military estimating anticipated civilian casualties is, by definition, taking those casualties into account. That does not establish whether the resulting thresholds were lawful, proportionate or morally defensible. But it does raise an obvious question about the claim of genocidal intent: if civilian deaths were being calculated as collateral to a military target, does that evidence support only the film’s conclusion, or can it also point toward an effort—however imperfect—to reduce civilian casualties?
The film is constructed around testimony from 24 Israeli military and intelligence personnel discussing Israeli targeting practices and civilian casualties in Gaza. Their identities and voices are concealed, and reviewers describe the subjects as filmed largely in darkness or otherwise visually obscured. The film’s official Venice synopsis goes further than describing an investigation: it declares that “NAZA” reveals “the systems behind Israel’s calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.” That language does not frame an investigation; it announces a verdict.
The best documentaries may begin with a question, a suspicion, even a strong point of view, but they remain open to discovery—to evidence that complicates or even contradicts the filmmakers’ assumptions. When the finished film presents its case as settled while giving viewers little ability to test the evidence for themselves, investigation starts to look more like prosecution. And that starts to look a lot more like propaganda.
There is nothing inherently wrong with using anonymous sources. Investigative journalists and documentary filmmakers do it routinely, particularly when sources face professional, legal or personal risk. Anonymity is sometimes necessary, but it imposes a corresponding obligation of verification and rigor. The audience cannot examine the sources’ identities, positions, access to information or motives on its own. It must rely on the filmmakers to have done so.
That obligation grows with the seriousness of the allegation. A film whose entire thesis relies on sources concealed from the viewer bears an even greater responsibility to demonstrate how those accounts were authenticated, corroborated, contextualized, and tested against conflicting evidence or testimony. And when the viewer is denied access to the sources themselves, presenting opposing evidence and interpretations becomes even more important.
The best documentaries may begin with a question, a suspicion, even a strong point of view, but they remain open to discovery.
The contrast with the aftermath of Oct. 7 is difficult to ignore. Reports that Israeli women had been raped, sexually assaulted, mutilated and murdered were repeatedly met with demands for hard verification and, in many quarters, outright disbelief. The absence of surviving victims in many cases, the destruction of forensic evidence and inconsistencies in some early accounts became grounds for questioning the larger body of testimony.
Months later, a U.N. mission concluded there were reasonable grounds to believe rape and gang rape had occurred at multiple locations and clear and convincing information that hostages had been subjected to sexual violence. Yet when allegations run in the opposite direction, as in “NAZA,” two dozen completely concealed voices can become the foundation for sweeping claims of “calculated mass killing” and receive 25 minutes of applause.
Naturally, the Israeli military has disputed the film, arguing that because the witnesses remain anonymous, the public cannot establish whether they served in the capacities claimed or possessed the knowledge attributed to them. Nor could those subjects easily challenge the editing or contextualization of their own words without risking exposure. The London-based Guardian news outlet, which produced the documentary, has notably been a relentless critic of Israel’s conduct throughout the war.
A serious documentary critic should therefore ask: Why these 24? How were they authenticated? What was their range of rank, responsibility and firsthand knowledge? Were people with contrary experiences interviewed? Which claims were independently corroborated? And did the editing preserve uncertainty and disagreement or resolve them in service of the thesis?
There is also something inherently persuasive about hiding someone’s identity on screen. Put someone in shadow, disguise the voice, obscure the face, and the testimony can take on an aura of danger and authority before the viewer has had a chance to assess it. On the page, anonymity withholds information. On screen, it can add emotional force. Concealment may be justified, but the more completely the sources are hidden, the more transparency the filmmakers owe the audience.
Yet much of the international reception has treated the film’s conclusion as an established premise. One prominent review called it “essential.” Another described it as laying bare the machinery of killing. The Venice festival itself presented the film using the filmmakers’ characterization of “calculated mass killing.”
Then came 25 minutes of applause. At that point, criticism began to look like catechism—and the reception itself resembled agitprop.
Ignoring the backstory
Imagine the reverse. A Palestinian filmmaker makes an equally uncompromising documentary about Hamas. Its subjects describe the deliberate slaughter of Israeli women and children on Oct. 7; the taking of civilian hostages; the operation of military infrastructure under hospitals, mosques, and schools; repression of Palestinians who challenge Hamas; and a leadership willing to expose its own population to catastrophic consequences in pursuit of an ideological, explicitly genocidal war.
Would such a Palestinian film receive the same welcome? Would European producers race to finance it? Would it reach the artistic apex of Venice? Would an audience stand for 25 minutes waving Israeli flags? Are all revelations equally welcome, or only those that confirm the moral narrative already dominant in the room—and across much of the Western arts and press establishment?
Palestinian suffering cannot be understood honestly if Hamas’s conduct is treated as politically inconvenient or mere background material rather than as part of the story itself. Would any of those cheering “NAZA” have been willing even to watch the damning 47-minute film compiled from Hamas’s own footage of the atrocities committed on Oct. 7? Ignoring this backstory may be the film’s greatest sin of omission.
Israel has become a subject around which certain sectors of Western cultural life appear to experience something approaching a moral compulsion—even an expiatory frenzy. The denunciation itself becomes evidence of virtue. And repeated accusation begins to stand in for proof. The harsher the indictment, the greater its moral seriousness appears to be.
Venice has seen politically charged cinema embraced as moral and artistic transcendence before.
Nobody forced the Venice audience to stand. But social coercion rarely announces itself as such. It operates through reputation, belonging, and fear of exclusion. Political scientists studying authoritarian societies have described “social desirability” and “reputational cascades,” in which individuals publicly display attitudes partly because they believe those attitudes are expected by others.
An ideological consensus can sustain itself even among intelligent and independently minded people. Many may believe fervently. Others may agree partially. Some may have doubts they fear expressing. Still others may simply want to participate in the communal high. Eventually the performance of consensus begins to look like consensus itself. In the roar of the crowd, “Free Palestine” and “Sieg Heil” start to sound eerily the same.
Venice carries another historical irony: The word “ghetto” originated there. On March 29, 1516, the Venetian Republic ordered its Jews confined to a separate quarter of the city. Gates were erected and locked at night. The name attached to that enclosure, derived from the area known as the geto, or foundry, eventually became the universal word for the compulsory segregation of Jews.
More than five centuries later, Venice is again a place where the boundaries of acceptable Jewish belonging are being drawn by the elite and the audience alike. The boundary today is not built of brick, and no gate closes at sunset. It is intellectual and moral: which Jewish voices may be embraced and under what conditions? It is a modern version of a question historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt posed almost a century ago in European Jewish life: whether Jews could belong as Jews, rather than on terms set for their acceptance.
In Venice, those terms are hard to miss. Abraham and Szor are being hailed for turning the knife on their own country, while at home Israeli politicians have called for stripping them of citizenship.
Yet even the Venice ovation can’t buy safety or acceptance. In parts of the West and on social media, they are still attacked simply for being Israeli, accused of gaining prestige on the backs of Palestinian suffering. The category of the “good Jew” is always conditional. History shows that usefulness, compliance, or ideological approval never guarantees exemption once Jewishness itself becomes the offense.
The asymmetry is hard to miss: automatic credibility granted to accusations against Israel, cultural prestige attached to denouncing it, and suspicion directed at those who challenge the prevailing narrative. When Jews and the Jewish state are subjected to standards that others are routinely spared, this is no longer merely criticism. It is a double standard, and that double standard has a name: antisemitism—the same ancient impulse that once confined Venice’s Jews behind ghetto walls and now finds expression in the ovation at its famous film festival.
My hope is that history will look back on this moment in Venice as we now look upon Riefenstahl’s pro-Hitler films, Stalin’s ovations and the ghetto itself not as expressions of moral courage, but as warnings about the dangerous ideological currents of their time.
