NAZA opened in Italy on Monday and did something no documentary about an ongoing conflict is supposed to do: it beat a Marvel blockbuster. The film took €451,872 on its first day and €1.1m by the end of Tuesday, against Avengers Endgame: Encore's €356,000 over the same period. It was booked for three days. It will now run indefinitely across more than 150 extended-programming cinemas. The audience response splits into two registers that tell you everything about what kind of film this is. At some cinemas, people held Palestinian flags and applauded. At the Tibur in Rome's San Lorenzo neighborhood, the audience watched in complete silence — not the silence of disengagement but the silence of shock. 'Even at the end, nobody spoke,' said a staff member named Marco. Both reactions are correct. The film earns them. Directed by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — who won the Oscar for No Other Land — and produced by the Guardian, NAZA documents the AI-powered targeting systems used by Israeli intelligence to select strike targets in Gaza. Its title comes from an acronym used internally by Israeli intelligence to estimate anticipated civilian deaths in an airstrike. The film draws on testimony from 24 anonymised Israeli soldiers and intelligence officers, filmed in secret on Tel Aviv rooftops, and builds on investigative reporting across three outlets: the Guardian, +972 Magazine, and Hebrew-language Local Call. The Venice Special Jury Prize and a 25-minute ovation — described as a festival record — gave NAZA institutional legitimacy before it hit theaters. But the Italian box office numbers suggest something different from festival success: a genuine public appetite, cutting across age groups and demographics that don't typically self-select for documentary cinema. Simone Gialdini of cinema owners' trade body Anec noted the audience isn't just activists — it's people who 'know what they're going to see and are aware of the tragedy we are living through.' The film's release structure is itself a statement. It will open in more than 50 territories over the next month, then become freely available on theguardian.com in mid-November. That arc — theatrical event, then universal access — mirrors the subject matter: evidence of systems designed to stay invisible, made public by people who filmed in secret and faced real consequences. Abraham and Szor addressed escalating threats by Israeli officials to revoke their citizenship at the North American premiere. 'Our country is doing so much to hide these systems,' Szor said. 'It's not a world that is open even to the Israeli public.' What NAZA achieves that most conflict journalism doesn't is formal accountability: named institutions, named systems, testimony from insiders, and a visual grammar that makes abstraction concrete. This is not footage of suffering deployed for emotional leverage — it is testimony about mechanism, about how a targeting acronym becomes a policy becomes a number. The 80-minute runtime is disciplined. Nothing is wasted. The question this box office performance poses is bigger than the film itself. When a documentary about an ongoing military operation outperforms a franchise rerelease in a major European market, the audience is not just consuming — it is signaling. Whether that signal travels into policy is a different film entirely. But NAZA has already done the harder thing: it made people sit in the dark, in silence, and reckon.
