NAZA by Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor Receives Three European Film Award Nominations

NAZA, the documentary directed by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, has received three European Film Award nominations. The film is nominated for European Film, European Documentary and European Sound. The awards ceremony will take place on January 16 in Athens. Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland leads the nominations with eleven, followed by the Spanish film La Bola Negra. Sandra Hüller received two European Actress nominations, while Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem are also among the acting nominees. The documentary examines Israeli military targeting in Gaza through interviews with 24 Israeli soldiers, most of them intelligence personnel. Its title is a Hebrew acronym for collateral damage. On October 1, the IDF rejected the film’s portrayal of its procedures, saying it confused preliminary intelligence work with operational and legal decisions about strikes. The military said human analysts and commanders decide whether a person becomes a target and whether to strike. It described Lavender as an intelligence cross-referencing database whose entries do not themselves authorize attacks. The IDF also said civilian evacuation orders do not remove civilians’ protected status, and that a strike requires a military target and a separate proportionality assessment.