A Venice Ovation, Then Death Threats: The NAZA Documentary's Two Audiences

The Sala Grande, the main screening hall of the Venice film festival inside the Palazzo del Cinema, went quiet first, and then the audience rose almost as one. That is how the Guardian described the reception given to NAZA, a documentary on Gaza, when it was shown on the Lido. The same film's directors have since faced what the paper calls vitriol in Israel, including death threats, during a febrile election campaign there.

The contrast is the story the Guardian tells: a work that the festival circuit has taken up as cinema, and that a domestic political season has taken up as a target. Venice has long been the festival where films about the Mediterranean's conflicts arrive with the weight of the news still on them. This year the weight has followed the film home.

For the Cultura desk the case is less about any single prize than about the position Venice now occupies. A festival that once measured a film by its applause is being read abroad as a place where applause itself becomes evidence in an argument conducted elsewhere.