A 25-Minute Standing Ovation at Venice: Applause as Political Weapon, Not Artistic Praise

Something strange happened in Venice’s Sala Grande last week. An official stood by with an eye on the clock, and when it stopped, the number was 25: a record-setting standing ovation for NAZA, a film that took the festival’s Special Jury Award. Venice, per American Thinker, is now reporting critical acclaim the way a track meet reports finishing times.

But Abraham Katsman, writing in American Thinker, isn’t impressed by the number. His argument is less about the film than about the clock itself: what does twenty-five minutes of sustained applause actually mean, and what is it doing?

The record, per Katsman, edges out the twenty-three-minute ovation given last year to The Voice of Hind Rajab, a Gaza film. He describes NAZA as “a cinematic hit piece targeting the Israel Defense Forces” and suggests, half-seriously, that Venice give dramatized blood libels their own category, since ordinary films can’t compete with what he calls “preposterous anti-IDF mock-umentaries.”

Katsman is careful to wave off several lines of attack he could have pursued. He sets aside whether the film is dishonest, whether its reliance on anonymous accusers is fair, and whether its central premise—that the IDF’s targeting analysis weighs likely civilian casualties, which in his reading is somehow treated as implying genocide—collapses under its own contradictions. He also sets aside whether the word “documentary” stretches far enough to cover the work, and which craft element the audience was actually applauding. Cinematography? Score? He suspects not.

How did the film get in?

He also raises a procedural question. The competition lineup was declared final on July 23, but NAZA’s entry materialized on August 24—roughly a month after the roster was locked. Festival slots are scarce, and producers and distributors battle over them until the final slate is announced. A film that arrives after that point, Katsman writes, “has not been selected normally. It has been inserted”—without even a Clinton-esque debate over what “final” means.

The jury composition is another thread he sets aside—but mentions anyway. Of the seven members, one was Kaouther Ben Hania, who wrote and directed The Voice of Hind Rajab, the previous ovation record-holder. Katsman describes her as a vocal and unabashed agitator against Israel’s war, the IDF, and the country itself, and says at least two other jurors signed statements along the same lines. In what other forum, he asks, would recusal not have been mandated?

The clock is the story

For Katsman, though, the most revealing part of the episode isn’t the film but the timing. NAZA hasn’t been publicly released. From what has been seen and reported, he writes, it seems less like a film than “a jaundiced TV news exposé—one that no legitimate editor would allow on air.”

He does the math: the film runs eighty minutes; the ovation ran twenty-five. That’s a full minute of standing ovation for every 190 seconds of runtime. Either NAZA is the greatest film ever made, he writes, or something less honest is happening.

His real target is the semantics of applause. In a theater or a stadium, an audience knows what an appropriate ovation looks like. Two minutes says, “We really appreciate your unusually skillful performance.” Five minutes says, “We are truly moved by how special this moment is.” Twenty-five minutes, by his account, is beyond any artistic performance—the ovation itself becomes the performance, “timed, noticed, hyped, reported, and deployed” as a demonstration of unified enthusiasm for damaging Israel’s standing, however ludicrous the underlying vehicle. He reaches for Orwell’s “Two Minutes Hate,” adjusted for inflation.

Was it orchestrated? Katsman says it doesn’t much matter. Everyone in that audience, in his telling, understood what was happening—which is why the clapping continued long past the point where it could plausibly say anything about artistic merit. They were clapping to make a point: to each other, to the cameras, to the media, to us. Whether spontaneous or not, he writes, the world represented by that audience was already primed to condemn the Jewish state. They didn’t really need a film; burning an effigy of Prime Minister Netanyahu or an Israeli flag would have drawn a strong ovation too.

He asks where the cinephiles and critics of integrity are—the ones who should be calling out what he calls a corruption of their craft.

A familiar scene, in a less glamorous room

Watching the spectacle, Katsman writes, he had the feeling he’d seen it before—in a far less glamorous setting: the U.N. Security Council.

That chamber, he notes, takes itself enormously seriously. Fifteen delegations sit in their horseshoe debating the language of resolutions on war, peace, famine, and atrocities—and on Israel. The tone is deliberately humorless, the aesthetic of sober judgment. The Council does not applaud.

Except when it does. Over the past dozen years, Katsman writes, the chamber has broken into spontaneous applause only a handful of times, including at passage of the JCPOA under the Obama administration, at Resolution 2334 in the final days of Obama’s presidency—which declared no legal validity to Israeli settlements in territory occupied since 1967, including East Jerusalem—and at Resolution 2728 under the Biden administration, a Gaza ceasefire resolution that did not make a ceasefire contingent on Hamas returning Israeli hostages. The common thread, he writes, is that all three were strongly opposed by Israel and all three passed due to U.S. support or abstention rather than a veto.

Three eruptions of applause from the most self-consciously solemn body on Earth, he writes. Applause for a resolution favored by Israel remains elusive.

The Council has voted on Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan, Russia, and Ukraine; on chemical weapons and famine relief; on genocides across three continents. None of those votes, according to Katsman, drew spontaneous applause. That, he concludes, appears reserved for resolutions opposed by and injurious to Israel.

What applause reveals

His broader point is about the difference between a vote and a clap. U.N. speeches are drafted, edited, lawyered, and cleared by other diplomats. Voting instructions come from foreign ministries. A vote tells you about a government, not necessarily the person casting it. Applause is different—an acknowledgement that one is in the company of the like-minded, and a signal of wanting to be counted among them.

When applause erupts in a forum whose authority rests on dispassionate neutrality, Katsman argues, it’s because the outcome was desired. The U.N. cheers, or the endless NAZA ovation, reveal what the supposedly impartial panels had been lusting for. Reflexive, unified applause that moves in only one political direction is not neutral judgment. It’s a bias—and, in his view, one that those applauding are no longer bothering to hide.

Whether readers accept Katsman’s framing or not, his central observation is hard to argue with: the ovation at Venice has become its own kind of news, reported and repeated as a metric. What that metric measures—craft, or consensus—is the question he wants the festival’s defenders to answer.

Source: www.americanthinker.com — https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2026/09/what-kind-of-movie-deserves-a-25-minute-standing-ovation/