The 83rd Venice Film Festival has added another piece to that uneasy mosaic, one that brings Gaza directly into the festival spotlight: Naza. The film festival is arriving with a selection that feels unusually tuned to the fractures of the present, from major auteur cinema to a documentary slate looking directly at a world in crisis. Among the most striking entries are films concerned with war, displacement, political violence, and survival.

It has given the documentary program the feeling of a cinematic weather map for an unsettled planet.

The paradox is difficult to ignore: the more wars the world produces, the more documentaries seem compelled to follow, creating a perpetual cycle of catastrophe and witness, but that is precisely why these films matter.

Naza, directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, has been added to the Official Competition of the 83rd Venice International Film Festival. The pair were two of the four filmmakers behind No Other Land, which won the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. Their new film will have its world premiere on September 10 in Venice and is the only feature documentary in this year’s Competition.

Shot at night from the rooftops of Tel Aviv, Naza builds on investigative reporting published between 2023 and 2025 by +972 Magazine, Local Call, and The Guardian. It is produced by The Guardian and James Wilson of JW Films, with Jonathan Glazer serving as executive producer. The title itself carries an unsettling piece of military terminology, referring to an acronym reportedly used to indicate anticipated civilian casualties from an airstrike. 

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That makes the Venice premiere more than another festival slot. It places investigative documentary filmmaking inside the festival’s most prestigious competitive arena.

Naza is not alone in bringing the region's disturbances into this year’s Venice program. Citizen Osama, directed by Ahmed Hassouna, will also be screened out of competition. It follows a former artistic photographer turned war documentarian in northern Gaza as he tries to protect his wife and newborn while recording the devastation around him. The film runs 68 minutes and comes from Palestine and France. 

Meanwhile, Amos Gitai’s The Road to Jericho, also screening out of competition, travels toward the threatened Bedouin community of Khan al Ahmar, while Muayad Alayan’s Conversation With The Sea appears in Venice Spotlight. Alayan’s film follows a 60-year-old Palestinian man in Jerusalem who is forced to investigate the disappearance of his son after an Israeli court demands payment for his supposed unpaid social security debt. This is, however, not Venice discovering the subject for the first time.

In 2025, Kaouther Ben Hania’s The Voice of Hind Rajab premiered in Competition and won the Silver Lion Grand Jury Prize after generating enormous attention and a reported 23-minute standing ovation. The 83rd Venice International Film Festival runs from September 2 to September 12, 2026. With Naza now joining the competition, the Lido once again becomes a place where cinema and history stare directly at each other. 

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What do you think of Venice giving Naza such a prominent platform? Share your thoughts in the comments.