NAZA and the Quiet Killers: When Perpetrators Take the Mic

By Daniel Okafor

One subject in the documentary NAZA says it plainly: they have been conducting a genocide. That claim comes from an anonymised member of Israeli intelligence, describing the remote execution of the assault on Gaza. The Guardian published its review of the film on 10 September 2026.

NAZA belongs to a growing body of work that critics call perpetrator cinema — films that hand the microphone to those who carry out atrocities, rather than their victims. It is a difficult genre. It is also, right now, a busy one.

Who speaks in NAZA?

The film's voices are anonymised intelligence personnel. They discuss how the assault on Gaza was executed from a distance. Remote killing, remote accountability. The camera never shows their faces; the sound carries everything.

What makes these subjects unsettling is how familiar they are. The Guardian's critic notes that when Hannah Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" — describing the blank persona of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann at his trial — the words pointed at bureaucratic grey men. NAZA's subjects are something else.

They are articulate, middle-class millennials. They describe themselves as leftwing and non-racist. The review puts it with some sting: put differently, they could be Guardian readers.

That line does the work of a thousand adjectives. It also lands the film's central discomfort — the distance between self-image and action.

Is the Eichmann comparison fair?

The comparison to Hitler's Germany is, the review concedes, understandably controversial. But it is not the critic's invention. A subject in the film makes it themselves.

Arendt's formulation described a functionary without ideas, a man of paperwork. NAZA's perpetrators are nothing of the sort. If they are banal, the review argues, it is a modern, oddly familiar kind of banality — ideological fluency paired with operational detachment.

The film, in other words, updates rather than repeats Arendt. The danger is no longer the clerk. It's the professional with the right politics and the wrong job.

What does perpetrator cinema ask of viewers?

The genre confronts audiences with what the review calls some of the most difficult questions of all. Should we listen to perpetrators at all? Does anonymisation grant honesty or impunity? Can a self-described non-racist leftist also author a genocide?

NAZA refuses to soften any of it. The subjects speak. We decide what their fluency is worth.

The broader trend matters because these films are arriving as a cluster, not as one-offs. Perpetrator testimony is becoming a documentary form of its own — one that treats atrocity not as an event to mourn but as a decision to explain.

Whether that shift deepens understanding or merely launders guilt is the question NAZA leaves open. The film's answer, per its subjects, is already on the record. Whether we can bear to watch it is ours.