"NAZA," the documentary about killings in Gaza that won a special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival, will open theatrically in more than 50 territories on September 28 and then become available to global audiences for free on the website of British newspaper The Guardian.

The Guardian produced the film with James Wilson of JW Films, with Jonathan Glazer as executive producer. French sales company MK2 has secured theatrical distribution in 56 territories since the film's world premiere in Venice on September 10.

Shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv, "NAZA" shows "in detail the systems behind Israel's calculated mass killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza," according to its official synopsis.

An Unusual Distribution Plan

The U.S. rollout begins September 30 and forgoes selling the film to a studio or independent distributor. It opens exclusively at the IFC Center in New York City and is "spearheaded by The Guardian and MK2, who have assembled a team of U.S. and international partners and consultants to bring the film to audiences as quickly as possible," the two companies said in a statement.

Beyond the United States, The Guardian and MK2 have secured theatrical distributors, so far unnamed, across France, the U.K., Italy, Spain, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Greece, Portugal, Poland, Lithuania, Romania, Bulgaria, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Thailand, Canada, Brazil, Turkey, Central America and the Middle East.

Italy will receive the widest single-country launch: a three-day event release on 500 screens via I Wonder distribution between September 28 and 30.

The statement added that the film has "been offered to a number of distributors and cinemas in Israel," and that The Guardian will explore other ways to enable screenings in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Built on Three Years of Investigative Reporting

"NAZA" builds on revelations first published by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972, the Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and The Guardian between 2023 and 2025.

Directors Abraham and Szor addressed their motives in a statement. "We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli filmmakers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible," they said.

"While filming members of Israel's military on rooftops at night in Tel Aviv over the past three years, we found ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents' generation and throughout the 20th century: how does one group of people allow the total dehumanization of another? What do the inner workings of such a system look like?" the directors said.

They noted that many of the film's revelations appeared almost immediately after they learned of them, in the months following the October 7th attacks, published by The Guardian in collaboration with +972 Magazine and Local Call.

"The film lets us explore something deeper than we could in our investigative journalism alone: not only the words being said but also those that are not said, the silence," Abraham and Szor said. "It is up to all of us to break that silence."

What the Free Streaming Model Signals

The decision to make the film freely available on The Guardian's website after its theatrical run marks a sharp break from conventional documentary distribution, where streaming rights typically go to paying platforms. Combined with the bypass of U.S. studio and independent distributors, the rollout treats speed and reach of access as the priority — a model that other documentarians seeking maximum public impact may soon study.