The director Jonathan Glazer has called Israel’s retaliation against NAZA’s film-makers and the military figures interviewed in the award-winning documentary “much more venal” than anticipated.

Since the film’s release, the Israeli government has denounced it and pursued those involved, announcing plans aimed at stripping citizenship from people who “smear” Israeli soldiers; accused NAZA’s co-directors, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, of treason; and ordered top legal and security officials to find and prosecute soldiers and officers interviewed in the documentary for causing “harm to Israel’s diplomatic and security interests”.

Speaking to the Guardian’s editor-in-chief, Katharine Viner, at NAZA’s UK premiere in London on Thursday night, Glazer, who is a producer on the film, said he was “shocked into silence” the first time he watched NAZA, which is produced by the Guardian and details Israel’s mass killing of civilians in Gaza.

He noted that it was “clearly in dialogue” with and “deals with very similar themes” to The Zone of Interest, the 2023 historical drama he directed and that depicted the mundane daily lives of Nazi officers overseeing the extermination of Jews at Auschwitz.

The Israeli government has promoted an online film project that mimics the style of NAZA in an attempt to counter the film’s findings. When asked whether he was surprised by the intense reaction of the Israeli government to NAZA, Glazer said some of it was expected but that, “in my point of view, it was much more venal” than anticipated.

Abraham said the film allows viewers to look at the “mechanisms that allow human beings to do this to other human beings”, and Zsor said the idea to shoot footage looking inside Tel Aviv citizens’ apartments was to focus on the “ritual” of people gathering around the TV to watch the “news and to see the absence or justification” of the devastation happening in Gaza.

NAZA is in UK cinemas and will be shown in more than 50 countries. As well as its global cinema releases, NAZA will be available free on the Guardian’s website from late November. When the film opened in Italy last month, it surpassed the Marvel movie Avengers Endgame: Encore to open at No 1.

The film contains 24 interviews with Israeli military insiders who detail how an AI-assisted apparatus of mass surveillance was activated during the Gaza war, revealing the systems that were used to target Hamas operatives in the knowledge that large numbers of Palestinian civilians would also die.

Various bodies, including the UN, Amnesty International, B’Tselem and Physicians for Human Rights, the latter two of which are Israeli-based, have said Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

The film premiered at the Venice film festival, where it was met with a 25-minute standing ovation – a festival record. The documentary went on to win the special jury prize.

Israeli government officials have attempted to discredit NAZA’s content, while far-right activists have threatened to hunt down the directors.

The Israel Defense Forces’ chief of staff, Eyal Zamir, has said they will use “every tool at our disposal” against the film, while the military has issued a 10-page response to NAZA, which was based on interviews with more than 100 sources with knowledge of the military systems used in the war.

Demonstrators have gathered outside the home of Szor’s parents, demanding that she face the death penalty, and a mural depicting the film-makers through the sights of a gun appeared in the Israeli city of Ashdod.

Szor and Abraham addressed the backlash to their documentary at a Q&A after its New York premiere. “Our country is doing so much to hide these systems,” Szor told the audience. “It’s not a world that is open even to the Israeli public.”

The Zone of Interest won the Oscar for best international film in 2024. Accepting the award, Glazer said he refuted his “Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people” in Gaza and Israel, comments that led to backlash and an outpouring of support.

He went on to say: “All our choices were made to reflect and confront us in the present, not to say look what they did then, but rather look what we do now. Our film shows where dehumanisation leads at its worst. It’s shaped all of our past and present.”