Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, two of the four directors credited for 2024's Oscar winning documentary No Other Land, about Israel settler’s government sponsored landgrabbing and daily violence in the West Bank in the Occupied Territories, come with a new documentary Naza, about systematic destruction and genocide happening in Gaza. I say genocide here, because one of the subjects in the film matter-of-factly admits it is.
Naza is a shorthand for Nazek Agavi, ‘Collateral Damage’ in Hebrew. Just like No Other Land, there is a controversy brewing, as the film does its festival runs - first Venice Film Festival where it won Special Jury Prize, and now here at New York. Netanyahu's government is threatening to revoke Abraham and Szor's Israeli citizenship and publicly marking them as traitors and enemies of the state even before the film’s general release. All I can say is, see it for yourself when it comes out. The Guardian, a British publication produced it (with Jonathan Glazer serving as executive producer). The filmmakers are self-distributing it with the help of MK2, a French company.
Naza consists of 24 interviews conducted by Abraham as an interviewer and Szor at the camera. The interviewees, all former and active Israeli military personnel, mostly intelligence officers who were engaged in the destruction of Gaza, in retaliation of the October 7th surprise Hamas attack that resulted in the death of 1,200 Israeli partygoers in a music festival in northern Gaza in 2023.
The interviews are conducted at night on the rooftop of downtown Tel Aviv, with interviewees backlit against blinking lights of shiny skyscrapers and their faces hidden in shadows and some of their voices altered, for protecting their identities from retaliation.
The filmmakers give a little bit of a background about Gazan history of building communication lines by the Israeli government. In fact, all communications in Gaza- if you have a cell phone, you will be intercepted and eavesdropped; that Israel has a total and complete control over the airwaves. But then, this prelude poses an uncomfortable question - how did Hamas manage such a large scale surprise attack? One of the interviewees admits that Hamas really outsmarted everyone, somehow.
The interviews make it quite clear that they knew collateral damage was unavoidable while leveling Gaza, which killed approximately 73,000 Palestinians so far and ongoing, majority of them women and children. More shockingly, it turns out Gaza happens to be the first genocide assisted by AI. AI interprets that the acceptable ratio for collateral damage is 20 to 1, meaning it is OK to order an airstrike or drone bombing wherever suspects are at, regardless if they are in a crowded place or alone.
It is mind boggling as these interviewees speak so matter-of-factly of these AI assisted decisions. They even mention a Hollywood movie such as Eye in the Sky, about a morally conflicted drone operator in Kenya, as if it was their ethics training video. Many of these whistle blower interviews are truly revealing and disturbing, as Abraham pushes them to answer his questions - Did you make those decisions in retaliation against what happened on October 7? Was it pure hatred that they were all enemies and deserved to be killed? Many answers coolly with a hint of irony - we are there to achieve military objectives. The order comes from the top and we follow it. It's like videogames. We do our job. They knew there were women and children.
Because Israelis have complete control, they could monitor everything that has been happening in Gaza. Some walked away after seeing dogs eating piles of corpses on the streets, some are still serving. All these interviews are intercut from time to time to show daily lives of inhabitants of Tel Aviv observed from the rooftop at night - doing chores in their apartments, walking on the promenade along the water, eating and doing ordinary activities, while talking candidly about despicable nature of what has been unfolding in the ‘war on Gaza’.
Abrams and Szor are journalists and activists. They did not go to film school and do not possess narrative storytelling skills. In No Other Land, narrative came naturally; we witnessed a friendship between Abraham and Basel Adra, one of the co-directors and the subject, a Palestinian activist, forming as they spent time together as the world around them fell apart.
In Naza, you don’t need such narrative. This atrocity doesn’t need to be narrativized. It’s a visual record of the war crimes being committed aided by AI technology. The chilling last minute footage of a collapsed building with the entire family’s feet sticking out of the concrete wall is a good reminder that once we delegate our moral obligation to AI, we’ve already lost whatever we are fighting for.
No comments:
Post a Comment