Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch NAZA
2026 · Yuval Abraham · NAZA on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 3 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Notice who sits in the dark and who is partly lit. (light)
Szor shoots every interview the same way: the soldier in darkness on a chair, Abraham across from him with some light on his face. The arrangement holds through all 24 speakers.
Payoff: The light tells you who is being questioned and who is being protected before anyone says a word.
Look at the city skyline behind the shadowed speakers. (camera)
The rooftop is the film's only location. Tel Aviv's glass towers and the lit Kempinski hotel fill the background while former intelligence operatives describe strikes 60 kilometers to the south.
Payoff: The testimony sits inside the society it describes; the glowing city, not Gaza, is what you see.
Watch the marker sketches the speakers draw on paper. (setting)
Instead of military graphics or reconstructions, the operatives explain the targeting systems by drawing layouts in marker on a sheet of paper. You hear the squeak of the marker tip as they draw.
Payoff: A chair, a skyline and a sheet of paper carry the whole case; you learn the system from a hand.
Listen for the altered voices and the silences between answers. (sound)
Every voice arrives digitally processed to protect the speaker, and no score plays under the testimonies. Between answers you hear traffic hum and planes passing overhead. Marshall calls it a quiet film with as many silences as words.
Payoff: The distortion keeps the words from attaching to a face, so a system speaks rather than a person.
Watch for cuts away to ordinary Tel Aviv evenings. (cutting)
Abraham and Szor break the rooftop testimony with televisions, meals, yoga, people watching the news, and drone footage of bombing aftermath. The everyday images keep returning throughout.
Payoff: Justin Chang reads these calm evenings as a mirror image of Gaza: one city living on while the other is struck.
The 3 rewatch keys open on this page when you choose "Seen it?".
Carry this in: Watch who is lit. Szor keeps every soldier in the dark and Abraham half lit, with the city glowing behind them.