NAZA arrives in the company of a small, bruising tradition. Perpetrator cinema — documentaries that grant voice and screen time to those who commit mass violence — has a short but shattering lineage: Joshua Oppenheimer's The Act of Killing (2013), Errol Morris's Standard Operating Procedure (2008), Jonathan Glazer's The Zone of Interest (2023). Directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor place their work squarely inside that tradition, and the result is journalism operating at the level of art. The film interviews anonymised members of Israeli intelligence involved in the assault on Gaza. They are, by the article's account, articulate, middle-class millennials who identify as leftwing and non-racist. One acknowledges participating in a genocide. The cognitive dissonance is not incidental to the film — it is the film's argument. These are not the monsters our moral frameworks require. They are, in the article's deliberately provocative phrase, the kind of people who read the Guardian. What perpetrator cinema does that conventional war reporting cannot is remove the abstraction from perpetration. Morris's Abu Ghraib soldiers were ordinary grunts in the machinery of the 'war on terror.' Oppenheimer's Indonesian death squad members re-enacted their killings as the action movies they saw themselves starring in — unrepentant, even giddy. NAZA's subjects, per Abraham, spoke from 'the opposite of shame.' The pattern is consistent enough to be a finding: people who commit atrocities at institutional scale do not, as a rule, confess. They explain. The ethical objections are real and deserve direct address. Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha has argued, with some force, that Gazans have already documented the assault in full — so what does this film add? The answer, which the piece sketches without quite pinning down, is something like: access to the machinery. The perpetrators of Standard Operating Procedure would not have talked to someone they saw as an adversary. NAZA's subjects spoke partly because Abraham and Szor are Israeli — their insider status is simultaneously a tool, an ethical complication, and a demonstration that dissent is still possible within that society. The film's existence is, itself, part of its argument. Oppenheimer's framing, cited here, is the right one: 'To understand a crime as a human activity, we have to look at the human beings who undertake that activity.' The risk of that project — and what the Netanyahu government's mimicking rebuttal Naza: The Real Story confirms — is that it works. The perpetrators lose control of their own story the moment they participate in honest documentary. The Indonesian gangsters of The Act of Killing believed Oppenheimer, as an American, would approve of killing communists. They were wrong about what the film would do. NAZA's subjects may have made a similar miscalculation. The piece's most useful critical move is naming what perpetrator cinema does NOT offer: catharsis. Hollywood is, as the article notes, a catharsis delivery system. These films are not. The subject who begins to retch near the end of The Act of Killing — his body trying to expel his own past — produces nothing. Nothing comes up. NAZA ends with the knowledge that what happened in Gaza continues. The genre refuses resolution because resolution would be a lie. The question the piece leaves open, and the right one to leave open, is what perpetrator cinema is actually for. Not for audiences in comfortable democracies to feel instructed in their anguish — the article is sharp about how safe that anguish is. Its real power, the piece argues, is internal to the societies it portrays. Oppenheimer released The Act of Killing free in Indonesia, where official history had echoed the gangsters' self-justifications. NAZA confronts an Israeli public with voices from within their own institutions. That is a different kind of intervention than international film festival acclaim. Whether it changes anything is a separate question — and perpetrator cinema, to its credit, does not pretend to know.
