By Dexter "Box-Office" Reel
The applause lasted 25 minutes. Inside the Sala Grande, the main hall of Venice's Palazzo del Cinema, the audience rose almost as one when the credits rolled on "NAZA," an 80-minute documentary about Gaza produced by the Guardian, according to the paper's own reporting.
That reception — described as stunned silence giving way to a sustained standing ovation — marks one of the more striking festival moments of the year for a film dealing directly with the war. But the reaction outside the festival has been starkly different: the Guardian reports that the film's directors have faced death threats in Israel, where the documentary's release has collided with a "febrile" election campaign.
We don't yet have independent confirmation of the threats beyond the Guardian's own account — worth flagging, given the Guardian is both the source and the film's producer, a dual role readers should weigh. What is clear is the gap between the two responses: acclaim in one of cinema's most prestigious rooms, hostility in the country the film is about, arriving in the same news cycle as a contested vote.
Festival ovations are a notoriously inflated currency — Venice audiences have stood for plenty of films that vanished quickly after. But a 25-minute standing ovation, if accurately reported, is on the long end even by that grade-inflated standard, and it puts "NAZA" in the conversation for awards attention this fall. Whether it finds distribution and an audience beyond the festival circuit — and whether the threats against its makers escalate or fade — are the two threads worth watching as the film moves from Venice toward wider release.
No wide release date has been reported yet.
— Compiled from reporting by The Guardian.
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