Making Creator Headlines · Page 2
A Gaza Documentary Finds an Audience Beyond the Festival Circuit
· New York time
NAZA, a documentary about killings in Gaza by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, has passed 1.5 million theatrical admissions across 47 territories, according to figures reported by Variety. The total as of November 6 places it among the year's most-watched documentaries in cinemas. The film also won a special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival. Its theatrical reach shows that a documentary dealing with the war can travel well beyond a festival audience, across markets where getting people into a cinema is a substantial undertaking in itself. The attendance figure counts admissions, not a complete measure of the film's reach or the views of everyone who saw it. It does, however, give distributors and filmmakers a concrete account of how many cinema visits the release has generated across those territories. For a nonfiction film, that is a notable scale of theatrical distribution. The subject hardly needs a marketing department to make it serious. The business question is how a documentary finds space in cinemas accustomed to competing for audiences with much larger entertainment campaigns. In this case, a film about events with worldwide consequences has found viewers in dozens of markets, without the customary promise that a sequel will solve everything.
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