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.

The Guardian's account is careful about the sequence. The ovation came first, in the Sala Grande; the threats came afterwards, from Israel, where the documentary's directors have been drawn into a campaign the paper describes as febrile. The Guardian does not report the film's award record in the passages available, and La Veduta does not attribute one to it. What the paper does establish is the shape of the response: acclaim in one country, hostility in another, and a pair of filmmakers at the centre of both.

Foreign coverage of Venice has changed accordingly. Reviews filed from the Lido now routinely carry a second paragraph about what happens to a film after the lights come up, and the Guardian's piece belongs to that habit. The festival's own machinery — the red carpet, the photocall, the queue for the 8.30 screening — is being described in the international press as the first stage of a political argument rather than a refuge from one.

Italy's stake here is institutional rather than local. Venice is the country's most visible cultural export each September, and the Biennale's film section is where foreign critics form their impression of what Italian programming values. When a documentary leaves the Lido under threat, the impression registered abroad is of a festival willing to programme difficult work and unable to shield the people who made it. That is a reputational fact the foreign wires will carry long after the prizes are forgotten.

There is a comparative point the Guardian's framing invites. Cannes, Berlin and Toronto have all had editions in which a single film's reception split along the lines of a conflict reported elsewhere, and each time the festival's organisers insisted that selection is not endorsement. Venice has made the same insistence in past years without the phrase travelling far beyond the trade press. This time the phrase is competing with a threat report, which is a harder contest.

What comes next is the part the wire cannot yet supply. The Guardian's piece is a report on responses, not on consequences: it does not say whether the film has distribution in Italy, whether further screenings have been altered, or whether the directors intend to travel again. La Veduta will report those developments when the foreign press carries them, and not before.