'NAZA' Beats 'Avengers: Endgame Encore' to Top Italian Box Office

"NAZA," the hot-button documentary about the war in Gaza that won a special jury prize at the Venice Film Festival, has debuted at No. 1 at the Italian box office, beating the Marvel re-release "Avengers: Endgame Encore."

The film grossed roughly €1.1 million ($1.2 million) on Monday and Tuesday, compared with €356,000 ($404,000) for "Avengers: Endgame Encore" over the same two-day period. The Marvel franchise re-release is in its second week at Italian cinemas.

Israeli directors Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor helmed "NAZA." The two are among the four co-directors of "No Other Land," which won the 2025 Oscar for best documentary. "NAZA" earned a 24.5-minute ovation at Venice and screened last week at the New York Film Festival, where it was well received.

The documentary was shot at night on the rooftops of Tel Aviv and explores the killing of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. It builds on revelations first published between 2023 and 2025 by the Israeli-Palestinian publication +972, Hebrew-language outlet Local Call and The Guardian. The Guardian and JW Films produced the film, with Jonathan Glazer serving as executive producer and French sales company MK2 handling international distribution.

I Wonder Pictures released "NAZA" in Italy as a three-day event originally planned for Sept. 28-30. Strong advance ticket sales and packed initial screenings led the distributor to extend the run beyond those dates. Numerous screenings had already sold out before the premiere.

The film's U.S. theatrical rollout begins Wednesday, starting exclusively at the IFC Center in New York City. The release forgoes selling the film to a studio or independent distributor. According to a statement, the rollout is "spearheaded by British newspaper The Guardian and MK2, who have assembled a team of U.S. and international partners and consultants to bring the film to audiences as quickly as possible."

"NAZA" will open theatrically in more than 50 territories and will subsequently be available to global audiences for free via The Guardian website in late November.

When the global distribution plan was announced last week, Abraham and Szor issued a statement explaining the film's origins. "We made this film out of a sense of obligation to use our position as Israeli filmmakers and journalists to examine the systems behind the mass killing of Palestinian civilians for which our country is responsible," they said.

"While filming members of Israel's military on rooftops at night in Tel Aviv over the past three years, we found ourselves asking the very questions that were asked by our grandparents' generation and throughout the 20th century: how does one group of people allow the total dehumanization of another?" the directors said. "What do the inner workings of such a system look like?"

They noted that many of the film's revelations were published almost immediately as they learned of them, in the months following the October 7th attacks, by The Guardian in collaboration with +972 Magazine and Local Call.

"The film lets us explore something deeper than we could in our investigative journalism alone: not only the words being said but also those that are not said, the silence," the statement continued. "It is up to all of us to break that silence."

With its Italian debut outperforming a Marvel title and a free global streaming release set for late November, "NAZA" now tests whether a documentary distributed outside the studio system can sustain theatrical momentum across more than 50 territories.