Miki Zohar didn't wait long. Two days after NAZA picked up the Special Jury Prize in Venice, Israel's Culture Minister posted on X that he intends to have the film's co-directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, stripped of their Israeli citizenship.

His language left nothing to interpretation. He called the win "shocking," the film "vile," and the filmmakers guilty of what he termed a betrayal of the state. "The self-loathing that burns in the creators, who are willing to harm their homeland just to get applause from antisemites around the world, is inconceivable and constitutes a betrayal of the state," Zohar wrote, adding that as minister he would "act immediately to revoke the Israeli citizenship of these despicable creators."

Whether a culture minister actually has the power to revoke someone's citizenship is a separate question. Zohar's statement doesn't spell out a legal mechanism. What it does spell out is where his cinema-funding overhaul is headed. Earlier this year he restructured how Israel bankrolls films, pulling public money away from independent and politically pointed projects and toward titles he's described as ones "Israelis love" rather than ones "Israel haters love." NAZA, never applied for that money in the first place. It was financed in part by The Guardian.

What NAZA actually shows

The documentary takes its title from an Israeli military acronym used to estimate expected civilian deaths before an airstrike is greenlit. Sourcing varies slightly across outlets on how many officers appear on camera, with testimony from IDF soldiers and intelligence officers describing the systems behind the operation. One subject reportedly says the military approved a strike that could kill 500 Palestinians. The IDF has denied that particular claim.

Accepting the Special Jury Prize, Abraham didn't hold back either. "It's honestly not very easy to stand here, thinking of all the Israeli politicians and journalists who are now attacking this film and denying it without even seeing it," he said, per Variety. He went further, pointing to the more than 200 journalists killed in Gaza and arguing that denial of the killings is what allows them to continue. He said he wants NAZA distributed as widely as possible in Israel, the US and Germany, the two countries he named as Israel's biggest arms suppliers. Szor added that the soldiers speak in Hebrew specifically so more Israelis hear it firsthand.

This isn't new territory for Zohar or for Abraham. The pair previously clashed over No Other Land, the West Bank documentary Abraham co-directed with Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, which won last year's Oscar for best documentary and never got a commercial Israeli release, going up free online instead. Zohar called that win "a sad moment for the world of cinema" at the time. Adra and Ballal have separately reported being targeted since, Ballal detained and allegedly beaten by IDF soldiers, Adra's home searched after settlers attacked him.

NAZA still has no distributor lined up in Israel. Given how loudly the minister is talking about revoking passports, that conversation with any Israeli buyer just got a lot more complicated.