Original subtitles

And actually, a lot of these things are also, it's important to say, are also

known because they've been documented by journalists, Palestinian journalists in

Gaza.

It's footage that has been out there.

But I think that we felt that there is still some sort of an importance to

take those testimonies and put it in a film in a way that, of course, first of

all, it's different to hear actually the people who designed and operated those

systems. talk about it in front of a camera and sketch it, show it. And also

in a film you can show things that are missing somehow in the journalism,

which are the society in which these things are taking place.

We are concentrating on the city of Tel Aviv in the film where the Israeli main

headquarter is and where a lot of these officers are operating from or live in.

Yeah, I think you want to add something?

Sure. Yeah, I agree with what Rachel said, and I think in our work with this

film, I feel also with No Other Land, we are trying to look at state crimes

committed by Israel which are systemic.

So also in this film, we are talking to 24 Israeli intelligence officers and

soldiers, and we really are looking at a system, at a system of killing, which

is... mass killing which is predicated on it relies on mass surveillance and

there's something about film there's something about cinema that i think

allows you to really explore structures of systems it's part of also how you

edit how you bring things together um and as yeah to reiterate what rachel

said like these are i don't feel this is the way to know the truth about the

crimes israel committed in gaza it's not i mean that truth should have been

evident and is evident, and from the work of journalists in Gaza, from

documentation that we've all seen.

But we felt the responsibility as Israelis to use our position and our

ability to gain sometimes confidence to bring insider

testimony into how the system looks like from the inside, the system of killing.

And this is the film that we made.

There's a question here.

Hello, Marco Consoli, Daily La Stampa.

At the beginning of the film, you're saying that the witnesses, the people

you talked with, where you used artificial intelligence in order to

protect them, this has been done before in other films.

I think this is one of the very few cases where artificial intelligence is

used for good.

But at the same time,

it poses questions about what truth is, because I'm guessing that people will

say that these accounts are not real.

I mean, we live in an era where, due to artificial intelligence, it's very

difficult to understand what is real and what is not.

What do you think about that? You know, what it brings to people that are doing

documentaries and journalism as well? Thank you so much.

Yeah, I mean, first thing, I think there may be a misunderstanding. The card says

that appearances and voices have been digitally altered.

And the reason for doing that is these interviews were very understandably on

the condition of anonymity. So in order to speak, these people asked to be made

anonymous.

And we, as journalists, can't talk about the methods and processes that we go

through to anonymise people because it would put them at risk.

But what we can say...

is these are real people. As Yuval said, they are all Israeli soldiers and

officers who served in the remote surveillance and killing of Palestinians

in Gaza.

And I think the strength of their testimony speaks for itself.

There's a question here.

Hi, good morning. Carlos Grau from Spain for the magazine El Antepenultimo

Moicano, the third to last Moican.

I would like to ask all of you, what do you think about the fact, and I don't

pretend to criticize at all, it's just sharing my thoughts, that the festival

announced this film one month later.

23rd of July was the announcement of the lineup, and almost one month after that

was announced that this film was going to be in the competition.

And it has been screened on the 10th, at the end of the festival, when many

journalists are not here.

So I guess you must be happy for be able to share this here.

But do you have any thoughts about these two things? Thank you.

The film was announced late at our request because we just had to finish

the film. We had to finish the process of anonymization that Paul was referring

to. And we thought it was better to...

for the film not to be publicly known about until that point.

To just reiterate what Paul said with your question, all that it is is that

the appearances and the voices have been altered to disguise the identity.

Nothing else.

In terms of the position in the festival, we have no issue with that.

The day, we're very proud and happy to be at the Venice Film Festival. It's a

great honor.

I've been lucky enough to work on films that have been here before,

grateful to be here. I don't know if others want to add.

There's a question here.

Hello, thank you so much for the film, John Bleasdale, The New World.

I think this film is important because although we know a lot of this, we need

to know that we know, and this film makes that point very clearly looking

into people's apartments.

I wanted to ask a question specifically about the use of the Shoah, the Memorial

Day which you show, and also one of the participants of your film refers

to going to Poland and learning about Nazis and asking a question that he

doesn't state but says, I still think the Nazis are evil, what does that make

me? That absolutely blew me away and I just wanted to hear your thoughts on

that.

So we are here in Italy and I can mention Primo Levi who spoke about

humanization and spoke about how you can turn a human being into an unhuman,

into something that is like dust, that can be destroyed and killed.

And I think the references to the Shoah, to the Holocaust, this is something that

came from some of the officers in the film.

I can say that for me personally,

as someone who's a Jewish Israeli, as someone who's, you know, my family are

parts of who are Holocaust survivors.

I think especially in a world where so often we find that the memory of the

Holocaust and the very real issue of anti-Semitism is used in a way to

justify actions that cannot be justified, to justify the slaughter of

civilians in Gaza, to...

I think it's important to look at those events and try to draw the universal

lessons from them which exist, which unfortunately prevail throughout many

cases of state crimes and atrocities and genocides.

And for me, I think it's important regardless, but especially in the

context of politics of memory where this is often used to do the opposite, we

should insist on having a kind of shared...

universal and human values that rely on the lessons we learn from that as well.

Hi, good morning. Maria Guerra, Kinotico Spain.

Well, this is a question for the directors here.

In the website, your statement, you say something about that this movie wants to

break... the silence.

And I'd like you to, I mean, to ask you about the state of the silence.

Because for the last three years, there's been like a silence that

whenever somebody criticized the Netanyahu government, it was accused of

being anti-Semitic. But in Hollywood, it was especially strange.

I mean, if you could share with us this state of the silence.

Thank you.

I hope I understood the question.

I feel, just to think about silence, I think that sometimes...

You know, sometimes silence can be as, you can be as complicit if you are

silent than if you speak. And it's part of the reason why we made the film is,

I mean, I think somebody asked before about this twilight zone between knowing

and not knowing.

And the ability to remain silent and to deny what is happening.

And as we said before, I mean, the proof is there. It was already there before.

Part of why we wanted to make this film is because I think that hearing

testimonies from officers who themselves operated these systems of killing,

designed them.

can make the denial of the crimes harder.

And there is a direct correlation between the silence or between the

denial of the crimes and their ability to persist.

And I don't know how many of you know, but the killing of civilians in Gaza is

ongoing. I mean, just this week as we were in the festival, there was a seven

-year-old girl killed with her father in her car. Israel bombed a school in Gaza.

What we are showing in our film is something that is very much ongoing.

Yeah, the need to make that denial harder.

I'll just add and say that when we talk about silence, first of all, we come

from the Israeli society in which the silence is complete.

No one talks about this.

But also talking about Europe and the U.S., when we talk about silence, it's

not just about, of course, statements are important and this talk inside

Hollywood and whatever.

is happening there, but we are talking also about actions from governments.

I mean, that's for us the important thing, to put pressure on Israel, yeah,

to stop it, as Yuval said.

Following up on the silence,

I'm sure it wasn't easy and it took a lot of time, but were you surprised that

there were even people willing to meet with you and talk?

For Rachel and for you.

Sometimes it was surprising.

I find that when you do investigative journalism, often all you have to do is

ask the question.

And you can find, you know, it can take time. This film we worked on for close

to three years. It can take months to find the right people.

I think in the context of the Israeli media landscape,

it really opened up a vacuum because the majority, not all, there are some

fantastic Israeli journalists doing really vital work, but the majority of

the Israeli media has been either completely ignoring the killing of

civilians in Gaza or actively inciting for it, justifying it.

And that opened a vacuum, I think, also for investigative journalists who just

want to ask these questions. This was our core question with the film. Like,

we didn't come with, you know, we just...

told these officers and soldiers please describe to us what you did how did the

systems look like and of course there were other questions that arose through

that but the principal question was the question of of detail sketch it for us

and we want to know how it worked and sometimes just asking the questions you

you you get answers

Hello there, Ben Dalton from Screen International.

Congratulations to you all on a very powerful film. This is probably best

addressed to Jim.

When you were here last year with The Voice of Hind Rajab, just before the

festival, a group of high-profile Hollywood actors, filmmakers joined the

project to sort of boost the profile. Is that something you're looking at here

with NASA?

Do you sense any concern, given that a few weeks ago Mark Ruffalo, a very high

prominent actor, was publicly accused of antisemitism by a major studio?

Are you looking at getting people on board here as well?

Thanks, Ben.

We haven't had those conversations here on this film. I don't

think that's going to happen.

Just, you know, films are different, but... So, no.

The second part of your question?

I don't know. We are... Unlike Mark, Ruffalo, we're... I'm Jewish.

Yuval and Rachel are Jewish Israelis.

Sean Glazer is Jewish.

It doesn't... I'm not saying that means we're right or wrong. I'm just... I'm...

I'm personally not worried about being accused of being anti-Semitic because I

am not. And I don't think my colleagues are. I've never heard or, you

know, sensed that. So I'm not being coy. I'm not being naive. I understand the

nature of the attack.

My good friend and collaborator, John Glazer, who's down there, our executive

producer, we, you know, we...

Made a speech at the Oscars where certain people also made the same

accusation. I don't want to dwell on it too much. It's quite a clear strategy

and part, I think, of the kind of repression and the cognitive dissonance

that allows people who think that, in my opinion, to fellow travel with the

systematic violence that's going on.

I think they might believe it, but I think it's a way of continuing to

repress the truth.

But I don't actually myself think there is any connection with Judaism or

Jewishness and the policies of the Israeli government, successive Israeli

governments towards Palestinian people, the indigenous population of Palestine.

There's a question there.

Hi. I wanted to ask if you're able to tell us how did you approach the people

that are being interviewed, if it's not too confidential.

And I find rather unsettling the juxtaposition between what they are

saying and at the end, they recognize that they're committing a genocide, but

they don't feel any remorse for that.

And I wonder if you could tell us whether you think that this documentary

kind of changed a bit their perception of what they're doing, or if they're

still completely convinced that.

of their original beliefs.

Thank you.

Yeah, I think different people had different motivations to speak.

As you say, some of them did not express remorse, others did express remorse,

some came to it from a point of...

They spoke in Hebrew, feeling that they want to try to penetrate these walls of

denial in the Israeli society and to reach Israelis. Others spoke out of a

sense of indifference.

Some even spoke out of a sense of pride in what they would consider their

professional achievement.

The film, if you notice, doesn't really dwell too long on these questions of...

what motivated them to speak, or as you were asking, of our journalistic

pursuits of trying to find them.

And this is because the film, its center of gravity is the killing itself.

Its center is the victims, in a way, because I think, you know, we talked

about Jonathan Glaser and the zone of interest, and there's one thing that...

that I think John said in the past about that film that stuck with me is that the

victims are out of the frame, they're out of sight, but they're never out of

mind. And we felt that by focusing too much on these feelings of remorse or

guilt that exist, we would be taken away from the core of the film.

And the core of the film is a system of killing, which has killed more than 70

,000 Palestinians in Gaza, estimates.

say the real number is much higher, the way it worked, and the way the world

allowed it to happen.

And this is the heart of what we want to do.

Hi, everyone.

Thank you very much for your work. And speaking about the Nazi genocide

comparison, I think that the difference, of course, is that today we have a lot

of images and videos thanks to people like you.

and we cannot and should not escape the reality of what's happening so my

question is how can we recover from all of this as humanity and i'm talking

about palestinian people israeli people european everyone how can we move on

from this yeah i mean i Of course, there is a lot of differences between

the Nazi Holocaust and what happened in Gaza, and there is differences between

different iterations of mass killings, of genocides, as we know.

But one thing that seems to be consistent when such crimes are

committed is that accountability and justice is crucial in order to be able

to move on.

Our film is filmed in the dark, and in a way I think it's a reflection of the

darkness that we are all living in.

It's a film that doesn't have a lot of points for hope in my mind, but I think

that it's clear that if we want to see light, as you say, if there can be a

future, there has to be recognition about what happened and there has to be

accountability for the crimes that were committed and people have to pay a

price. I think this is a universal kind of trait of mass atrocities.

I want to follow up on what Yuval said about the dark.

The film is shot at night, and it's also shot against the skyline of, you know,

the Tel Aviv. It's where you see Israeli living their lives, you know,

undisturbed. And we're talking about Gaza where nobody can have that life.

I wanted to ask you and Rachel, Rachel and you, what are the cinematic choices?

What were the cinematic choices behind making the film and translating visually

what, you know, what the reporting had documented before?

Yes, so I'll be honest and say both me and Yuval were not filmmakers.

We didn't study cinema and we came also to No Other Land and also to this film

from a sense of responsibility to tell these stories.

But of course at the end we are making a film so we have to try to make it as

watchable as possible. But every choice that we made cinematically has also some

sort of connection to the story and to what we wanted to say.

We chose to... I mean, I don't remember exactly how we reached this idea, but we

knew that the interviewees are going to be anonymous, so we knew that the

background should have some sort of life in it. And I think somehow that led us

to the idea of rooftops also as a place that is more secret. You can have an

intimate conversation there.

And as I think we said before, a lot of these...

officers are coming from the elite of the Israeli society.

They consider themselves sometimes left-wing.

A lot of them are from Tel Aviv.

And I think, yeah, we also wanted to examine the life of Tel Aviv next to

these very, very hard testimonies. Somehow it shows how the life in the

city goes on. Of course, it doesn't go on completely.

Yeah, there are regular life.

We're interested in looking into what people see in the news.

Every day there's like a ceremony in Israel. Also my parents do it. They

watch the news at 8 o'clock.

And it was important for us also to show the difference between what they're

actually Israeli soldiers are saying that they did and what the media is

representing.

Yeah. I think we have a question here.

Hello, I'm Polly from Greece. Thank you for this movie. Thank you for the

previous movies.

I wanted to ask you, I grew up thinking and believing that cinema is a powerful

tool, that we listen to stories and we open a dialogue of all the important

things that happen in our world.

With all the Palestinian matter, I feel helpless a little bit. We have seen so

many films, so many documentaries. People are speaking about it in

festivals, at the Oscars.

and they're still bombing and there's still a genocide.

Do you feel that we're going to crack a little bit the system? We're going to

get this dialogue through?

Sometimes I feel that we talk amongst ourselves.

No, thank you for this question.

I think, you know, the Guardian were well known for, you know, independent,

fearless journalism.

But I think what we're really interested in with this is that it's at the

intersection of journalism and cinema.

And I think with films like that, that are sort of editorially very rigorous,

but also creative and artful, I do believe in the power of those to bring

people together, create conversations and move us. I think, you know,

incredibly brave.

journalists and filmmakers we have here and the team that we have around us

which is a huge team who will bring that along and I hope we'll find more allies

here to have those conversations and I think it's together that we will sort of

do that.

Peter Paul Hood, Interfilm Germany.

Following up with what you said about media coverage, I was wondering

why foreign correspondents pick up so little of which is shown in your film.

I mean, they don't have access to Gaza, but you're not filming Gaza either.

But they could search for some intelligence officers like you did, but

mainly in Western...

News coverage, or what I can say in Germany, is kind of statements from IDF

are being repeated.

Oh, there was another hospital with a Hamas unit underneath.

So I was wondering, why are foreign reporters so kind of

cowardly or so cautious not to go deeper into the

subject? Thank you.

I think I may take that question.

Thank you. I mean, I think in fairness to foreign correspondents, there is a

diverse range of them.

And in Israel, it's not an easy place to be a foreign correspondent. Of course,

Gaza is inaccessible.

But what I would say about this, and as Lindsay and Rachel and others have said,

this is a sort of marriage between cinema and journalism.

You know, it's first and foremost a film, but it is built on the foundations

of years of painstaking...

very time-consuming journalism, principally led by Yuval, with my

colleague Harry Davies, who's an investigations correspondent at The

Guardian and another producer on the film.

And it does take... You know, I've been working as a journalist for two decades

now. It does take years to develop and build relationships and also reputations

of trust.

And I think... I mean, Yuval may have more to say about this, but this seems

to me the type of film that only...

Israeli filmmakers directors would have been able to make Do you have thoughts

on that either?

No, I think I think yeah, it's it's it's it's Probably true and I think part of

the reason is and we know you should have said this before I think if a

Palestinian, you know Palestinian colleagues and journalists would try to

call Israeli intelligence officers, you know what will happen like they will be

may be arrested indefinitely or killed and murdered, like 200 journalists in

Gaza and dozens across the West Bank. So we are examining a system where we know

we have privilege, we know we have a kind of power in it, a system which we

oppose and we think it's unfair that it's like this, to use what we can do

from our position and disconnect to different questions about, I think, your

question about impact and film.

It is very devastating.

I think you are right. I also think about our documentary, No Other Land,

which was about the community of Massafer Yatta and the occupied West

Bank. And just this week, Israeli bulldozers came there and destroyed two

villages in their entirety.

And I don't think that this means that, you know, the countless of journalists

and documentarians should stop doing what they are doing. I think we are all

trying from different angles to...

to work from our positions in the world. And I think this is what we feel we are

trying to contribute somehow.

Hello, Daniel Kortenschulde, Frankfurter Rundschau. Thank you for this major

work.

In my country, it's difficult to compare the war crimes that Israel does to the

history of the Holocaust, but your film seems to draw on the history of

Holocaust films by Claude Lanzmann, who is quoted smartly, and maybe also Alain

René, I would like to know from you, if you are influenced by this way of

speaking about...

all crimes through the history of Holocaust films, and also if Hannah

Arendt's famous quote of the banality of evil would make sense in speaking about

the modern AI-generated, stimulated ways of killing. Thank you.

You spoke about your country and about Germany, and I think, for me at least,

that when we say never again, when we say we want to learn from what happened

in the Holocaust, the way to do that is to think about patterns that are

applicable and can be seen and observed in our present.

I mean, in order for it to have relevance to the world that we live in,

again, it doesn't mean that there is...

that I'm saying it's the same or it's identical.

I don't think it is. I think what we should be saying and we should be doing

is recognizing similar patterns of dehumanizations, what happened when

there is a system of killing that is in a way, as we show in the film, for

example, its basic unit of targeting, as one of the officers says, is a family

house in Gaza.

By doing that, I think we are doing, in my view, some kind of, I don't know if

justice is the right word, but we are respecting somehow the memory of the

Holocaust because we are finding what we can from it that has...

loads our current reality and kind of strengthens our belief in human rights

and empathy for people.

I'm sorry, I'm told that this is all we have time for with the press conference.

Sorry about that.