Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor already had an Oscar for No Other Land. This weekend they added a Venice Film Festival Special Jury Prize for their new documentary NAZA, which examines the systems behind Israel’s mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza, according to the festival’s synopsis. The celebration didn’t last long. Israel’s Culture Minister, Miki Zohar, posted on X calling the film treason and saying he would act immediately to revoke the directors’Israeli citizenship.
The directors say they made NAZA out of an obligation to use their positions as Israelis to examine those systems. Right now the film has no distribution in Israel, but the team hopes to release it widely there, in the US, and in Germany. Meanwhile, the citizenship threat has turned a festival win into a full-blown free-speech debate, and it’s only getting louder.
So we want to know what you think. Should a film ever put someone’s citizenship at risk, and does the controversy make you want to see NAZA more? Sound off in the comments.
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Local Lawton
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