In Israeli intelligence usage, «nezek agavi» names the civilian death an air strike is expected to produce before it is ordered. Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor took the abbreviation for their title and spent three years assembling what sits behind it. Twenty-four military and intelligence insiders, filmed at night on Tel Aviv rooftops with faces obscured and voices altered, describe a surveillance apparatus feeding an AI that selects targets and calculates in advance how many civilians a given strike will kill, a permitted figure running as high as five hundred. One officer recalls reading the messages of a seven-year-old girl waiting for her father to come home, the signal that the house was worth bombing.
Modern Times Review editor-in-chief Truls Lie and critic and scholar Sonya Vseliubska spoke in Venice the day before the film took the Special Jury Prize. Their conversation stays with the algorithm only long enough to place it in a longer lineage, from Deleuze’s control society to Grégoire Chamayou’s account of the drone as an instrument designed to spare the operator the gaze of the person being killed. Vseliubska draws the line forward to Ukraine, where AI-guided systems have begun deciding the manoeuvre and the shot on the soldier’s behalf. Lie turns to Agamben’s homo sacer, the figure degraded far enough that killing him carries no consequence.
The talk then moves to form. Both read NAZA as an essay film in Adorno’s sense, experimental in its aesthetics and openly heretical in its argument, with Jonathan Glazer as executive producer and The Zone of Interest as its obvious companion piece. The closing exchange concerns what happens after the twenty-five minutes of applause, the calls in Israel to revoke the directors’ citizenship, and a denialist reception whose vocabulary Vseliubska recognises from another war entirely.
«After seeing it, you cannot say this is not happening.»
Read the full conversation at moderntimes.review
https://www.moderntimes.review/a-conversation-on-naza/