Neon Joins NAZA After the Film Already Made Millions

Neon joined the U.S. release of NAZA on October 21, three weeks after the Gaza documentary opened without a Hollywood studio.

Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor’s 80-minute film, built from anonymous interviews with 24 members of the Israeli military, had already taken $7,562,362 worldwide, most of it in Italy, where it opened at No. 1.

Neon Is Buying a Film That Already Found Its Audience

The U.S. distributor said it will work with the filmmakers to expand the film’s footprint and reach larger audiences and communities. People close to the deal said Neon had been in talks since a New York Film Festival screening in September and will now supply publicity, theater bookings and advertising funds, the package it puts behind other acquisitions.

MK2 Films, which launched international sales before Venice, negotiated the partnership. The film is a Guardian production with James Wilson’s JW Films, in association with Placeholder Films and Unseen Hand. Jonathan Glazer, director of The Zone of Interest, is an executive producer.

Exact terms were not disclosed. The public line is partnership, not a from-scratch pickup of a film sitting on a shelf. NAZA had already been booked into U.S. theaters by its producing team, sold in more than 50 countries, and ranked as a specialty holdover before Neon’s name went on the file.

Yuval and Rachel have created one of the best films of the year; it’s an extraordinary work of art and eyewitness testimony that stands alongside landmark documentaries like Laura Poitras’ Citizenfour and Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing. At the heart of Neon’s mission is a commitment to championing the best cinema from around the world. We’re proud to join the incredible team already working on the film and help bring it to the widest audience possible.

Neon, statement, October 21, 2026

That comparison does the awards-season work a late partner is hired to do. It does not change the order of events. Theaters were already selling tickets. The sales agent was already closing territories. The producing paper had already set a free streaming date.

FROM VENICE TO A U.S. STUDIO

1. September 10, 2026: Premieres in competition at the 83rd Venice Film Festival as the only documentary in the race and draws the longest standing ovation in the festival’s history.
2. September 12, 2026: Wins the Special Jury Prize. MK2 is already selling the title worldwide.
3. September 13, 2026: Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar says he will move to revoke Abraham and Szor’s citizenship.
4. September 28, 2026: Opens in Italy as a three-day event, then holds and goes to No. 1.
5. September 30, 2026: Opens in the United States at New York’s IFC Center, still without a traditional Hollywood distributor.
6. October 10, 2026: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu orders officials to name the interviewees and open a criminal case.
7. October 21, 2026: Neon joins the U.S. release to expand an existing run.

The sequence is the commercial fact hiding under the mission statement. Neon arrived after the festival prize, after the Italian opening, after the U.S. expansion, and after the Israeli government had already turned the film into a national fight.

A No. 1 Opening in Italy, Then a Long Hold

Italy did the work U.S. buyers spent two years declining to do. I Wonder Pictures booked NAZA as a three-day event from September 28 to 30. Advance sales and packed houses pushed exhibitors to keep the prints, and the film opened at No. 1, ahead of the Avengers: Endgame Encore re-release.

ITALY BEFORE ANY U.S. STUDIO SIGNED ON

• Opening weekend: $1,389,707, per figures compiled by The Numbers.
• Italy total: $5,712,420 as of the October 19 report, about 75 percent of the film’s worldwide take.
• Booking plan: A three-day event that exhibitors extended after the first houses filled.
• Chart: No. 1 in its first days, then a hold in the national top ranks.

That Italian number is larger than the entire worldwide run of Abraham and Szor’s previous feature. A Gaza documentary with disguised faces and altered voices did not sneak through a handful of art houses there. It played multiplexes and city cinemas on the same weekend, then stayed.

Other reported territories trail far behind that haul. The Netherlands has taken $771,691 since October 1. Portugal has taken $111,873. Spain, which opened October 9, has reported $80,488. Those three markets plus Italy account for the entire $6,676,472 international total published through October 20. The U.K. opened October 16; that gross has not yet shown up in the same tally.

Domestic Sales Reached $885,890 on 105 Screens

The U.S. and Canadian run started smaller and later. The Guardian is listed as the domestic releasing entity. The first weekend played a single theater and still put up a $56,605 per-screen figure that specialty bookers chase for months.

U.S. WEEKENDS BEFORE NEON

The October 9 frame, billed across 30 cities, jumped 425 percent as the footprint went from one screen to 85. The following weekend added 20 theaters and dropped 40 percent, a normal step-down once the first wave of interest is spent. Through October 16 the domestic total sat at $885,890, 11.7 percent of the $7,562,362 worldwide theatrical gross.

That is a real specialty hold, and it is also the part of the map Neon was hired to enlarge. The company is not opening a film. It is inheriting 105 theaters and a three-week box-office file, then trying to stretch both through awards season.

The Oscar Winner That Taught Them Self-Release

Abraham and Szor already know this route. With Palestinian co-directors Hamdan Ballal and Basel Adra, they made No Other Land, about Israeli settler violence and home demolitions in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank. The film won the 2025 Oscar for best documentary feature and still never landed a traditional U.S. distributor.

Abraham said at the time that he “read it as something that’s completely political.” The movie was booked theater by theater, with Cinetic Media and consultant Michael Tuckman handling the U.S. screen-by-screen plan, while distributors in other countries signed on. It took $2,549,422 in U.S. theaters and $3,651,497 worldwide, a hit by current documentary standards and a long grind to get there.

NAZA is already ahead of that worldwide total after a few weeks, because Italy paid in a way the West Bank film never did. It is still behind No Other Land inside the United States, where the older title had months, an Oscar night, and 130 screens at its peak. The lesson the pair took from 2025 was not to wait for a U.S. buyer. They opened NAZA themselves, with the paper that financed it, and let the gross accumulate in public.

Neon’s entrance reads, in that light, as a correction of the earlier freeze and as a bet placed after the proof was on the board. Distributors who passed on No Other Land can now point to a partner of record on the follow-up without having taken the first risk. The filmmakers get booking muscle they did not have last time. The audience, at least in Italy, had already voted.

What NAZA Means on an Israeli Target Sheet

NAZA is the Israeli military’s shorthand for collateral damage, the number of civilians a strike is expected to kill. The 80-minute film, shot at night on Tel Aviv rooftops over three years, puts 24 anonymized soldiers and intelligence officers on camera describing how those numbers were set, including with AI-assisted targeting, while voices and faces are digitally altered.

WHAT THE FILM PUTS ON THE RECORD

• The title: A military acronym used for the civilian deaths expected in an airstrike, without a split between adults and children.
• The method: Secret rooftop interviews in Tel Aviv, identities hidden, built on reporting first published by +972 Magazine, Local Call and The Guardian from 2023 to 2025.
• The source pool: More than 100 people familiar with IDF systems used in Gaza, the producing paper said, including senior commanders who authorized strikes; 24 appear on camera.
• The claim on screen: Interviewees describe an apparatus that treated high civilian death counts as an accepted cost of hitting suspected Hamas members, with reported thresholds that in some accounts ran from under a dozen people to 200 or 500.

The IDF has called a 500-civilian figure “completely false” and said strike approval is made by human personnel only. Abraham has said the killing described in the film was systemic, not an accident. Lindsay Poulton, The Guardian’s head of documentaries and a producer on the film, tied the Special Jury Prize at the 83rd Venice Film Festival to “cinematic storytelling grounded in fearless, independent journalism” and said the hope was renewed attention on Gaza.

Nathanaël Karmitz, CEO of mk2, and Fionnuala Jamison, managing director of mk2 films, said the direction struck them as much as the testimony, and that the company’s job included giving audiences “the keys and tools to confront the truth of the world we live in, however difficult that truth may be.” That is the language sales agents use when they already believe the film can travel. The Italian chart later made the same argument in ticket sales.

A Letter to the Attorney General and Shin Bet

Inside Israel the fight is not about per-screen averages. After Venice, graffiti in Ashdod labeled the directors “traitors.” Protesters gathered at Szor’s parents’ home in Savyon and chanted for a death sentence. Zohar, the culture minister, said he would act to strip the pair of citizenship for betraying the state. Lt. Gen. Eyal Zamir, the IDF chief of staff, called the film an attack that spread “lies and blood libels” and ordered an effort to identify the soldiers on screen.

On October 10, Netanyahu sent a letter to Attorney General Gali Baharav-Miara, Zamir, and Shin Bet head David Zini demanding they “act urgently to uncover the identity of all those who are involved or appear in the libel film.” He asked for a criminal investigation and prosecution for “serious information security offences, criminal defamation, and harming Israel’s diplomatic and security interests.”

The military advocate general, Itai Ofir, has said a criminal case would need evidence of security violations or leaks of classified material, though disciplinary steps could still be used. The government has also boosted an online rebuttal, NAZA: The Real Story, made by attorney and army reservist Ariel Averbuch, who called it an “offensive move” to shift attention away from the original film’s claims.

After first threatening to strip NAZA’s directors of their Israeli citizenship, the Israeli government is now calling for an investigation into their journalistic sources. These moves are all attempts to distract from the urgent questions the film asks about the mass killings of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Journalists should be free to pursue public interest investigations without threats or harassment.

Spokesperson, The Guardian

The producing paper said its credibility checks included leaked classified documents, verification of specific strikes, and a wider pool of confidential sources who never sat on a rooftop. Ricardo Gutiérrez, general secretary of the European Federation of Journalists, called the threats “a blatant act of intimidation against journalists who have simply been doing their job.”

WHERE EXPERTS DISAGREE

• The filmmakers and The Guardian: The testimonies were checked against documents and a source pool of more than 100 people, and the on-camera soldiers describe a system, not isolated errors.
• The IDF: The claims are rejected as distorted and unverifiable because the speakers are anonymous, and humans, not an automated system, approve strikes.
• The military legal office: Naming and charging the interviewees is not automatic; a criminal file would need proof of a security breach, not only a political order.

That split is the weather Neon just walked into. Awards consultants can sell Citizenfour comparisons. They cannot settle whether rooftop testimony, even wrapped in a newspaper’s verification process, is treated in Israel as journalism or as a leak. One loud line of attack, amplified after Abraham sat with Israeli journalist Raviv Drucker, is that not every strike cited on screen was independently reconstructed and that Hamas’s use of human shields is not the film’s subject. The counter is the paper’s document trail and the 100-source pool. Neon does not have to win that argument to sell tickets in Brooklyn. It does have to live with it through February.

Free on the Guardian Site in November

The producing organization has already told audiences the finish line. After the theatrical window, NAZA is due to stream for free on The Guardian’s website in November, as part of what the paper calls a commitment to spreading independent journalism. U.K. cinemas opened October 16. The free date sits only a few weeks beyond Neon’s first full month on the account.

That calendar is the catch a traditional distributor usually refuses. Exclusive theatrical runs are how specialty films build grosses, critic groups, and guild screeners. A free global stream in November trims the window in which Neon can claim that seeing NAZA means buying a ticket. It also matches the paper’s other identity. The Guardian did not finance an 80-minute feature in order to keep it behind a box office forever. It made a film it intends to give away.

Neon’s useful remaining job is narrow and concrete: more U.S. screens, paid ads, an awards campaign, and a logo that exhibitors and voters recognize. The filmmakers get that help after they already opened the picture, after Italy paid $5,712,420, and after the prime minister asked the security services to hunt the people on camera. The free stream will still arrive on the paper’s schedule. The soldiers on those Tel Aviv rooftops will still be anonymous, unless the letter to Shin Bet finds them first.