Will the Year’s Most Powerful Documentary Ever Make It to Theaters?
The striking new documentary No Other Land, directed by a four-person Israeli-Palestinian collective, was filmed largely between the years 2019 and 2023 in and around the southern West Bank community of Masafer Yatta. The picture, which also includes lots of archival material dating back well over a decade, wrapped shooting last October, just as bloodshed in the region escalated to new levels; a terrifying coda shows an October attack by Israeli settlers aided by IDF troops, in which one Palestinian villager, one of the filmmaker-subjects’ cousins, is shot from point-blank range.
Masafer Yatta is not in Gaza, but the intensification of violence there doesn’t come as a surprise. That shooting is not the only onscreen casualty we witness in No Other Land, either. People die over the course of this picture. Filmed with prosumer cameras and iPhones as well as high-end video, the movie brings us face to face with the brutal consequences of occupation. It tracks two interconnected stories that stretch across years: One is the IDF’s ongoing efforts to expel the Palestinians living in this area; the other, the growing friendship between two of the filmmakers. Basel Adra is a trained lawyer who has spent pretty much his entire life under the specter of expulsion. (Early videos show his father getting arrested by authorities for protesting Israel’s incursions into their community.) Yuval Abraham is an Israeli investigative journalist from nearby Be’er Sheva. Neither man is coy about identifying as an activist. Adra has spent years posting videos of military excursions into his village and surrounding areas; Abraham reveals that he himself quit the IDF when they assigned him to an intelligence unit thanks to his fluency in Arabic. (The two other credited directors are Palestinian Hamdan Ballal and Israeli Rachel Szor, who also served as the film’s cinematographer.)
Despite their shared politics, Adra is wary of Abraham at first. The Israeli can go home at night to Be’er Sheva, just a half hour’s ride away, with the freedom to drive on roads the Palestinian can’t; he also doesn’t have to regularly wake up in the middle of the night to home invasions and stun grenades. For all its broad timespan, No Other Land often sits with its subjects for extended stretches to let them discuss politics and life. In one scene, Abraham talks to a man who clearly struggles not to hold him responsible for Israel’s actions. “How can we remain friends when you come here?” the man asks. “It could be your brother or friend who destroyed my home.” Alternately friendly and standoffish, their conversation happens as they work together to rebuild a house that’s been destroyed by the IDF.
It may escape our notice that this other man is in fact Hamdan Ballal, one of the film’s co-directors. This is the kind of honest, human moment that the average political documentary might resist, for fear of muddying an otherwise clear-eyed perspective, or even showing the filmmakers themselves having conflicted feelings, especially towards each other. Presented here, it makes the heartbreak of this reality that much more palpable. We see the psychic strain of occupation and violence on ordinary people, how it colors their most intimate moments. Elsewhere, Abraham and Adra talk about whether they will ever get to start families. It’s a warm conversation between two friends, and yet it’s filled with telling, awkward pauses; what goes unsaid in this movie is sometimes even more powerful than what is spoken.
Out here in the West, we suffer from a weird but convenient form of memory loss when it comes to this struggle. Our brains are wiped clean after each new flare-up, and we see any subsequent events in binary, simplistic cause-and-effect terms: The Palestinians did this, so the Israelis did this, or vice versa — when the truth of the matter is that this bloody occupation, with all its perpetual-motion cruelties and endless mental tolls, has been going on for decades, with ordinary people caught in the middle.
In that sense, perhaps the greatest achievement of No Other Land lies in the way it compresses time. At one point, Abraham expresses disappointment at the fact that one of his reports didn’t get much internet traffic. Adra chuckles, gently chiding his friend for his impatience and his need to effect change immediately. The truth is that nobody really wants to read about the razing of a single home, or chicken coop, or even school. “This is a story of power,” Adra reflects. Not just in terms of who wields it, but in how it’s exercised and understood. The IDF’s attempts to wipe out Masafer Yatta do not occur in large, sustained bursts, because that would attract international press attention. (Archival footage shows that a visit by then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair years ago prevented the destruction of a school the villagers had built for their kids.) No, the devastation comes in dribs and drabs, via sporadic incursions over years: a home bulldozed here, a well filled with concrete there, a 2 AM home invasion there. But onscreen, in No Other Land, it happens in a matter of minutes, and this cinematic manipulation of time feels like a necessary and revealing reversal of that power dynamic.
No Other Land premiered earlier this year at the Berlin Film Festival, where it won two major awards and provoked some controversy. Perhaps the most ridiculous example of the latter came during the festival’s closing night ceremony, when Adra and Abraham took the stage to receive an award and spoke out against the IDF’s actions in Gaza and for Germany’s continued military support of Israel. The German culture minister, Claudia Roth, applauded their speech. Later, in a surreal development that could easily serve as a scene in the movie itself, she issued a statement noting that she was applauding only the Israeli member of the filmmaking duo and not the Palestinian.
Since Berlin, the picture has continued its march through the international festival circuit, consistently receiving great acclaim and winning more awards. Last month it screened at the Telluride and Toronto Film Festivals, and now it’s showing at the New York Film Festival. (Earlier this week, the directors had to cut their U.S. visit short after Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and Iran’s missile attack on Israel.) And while No Other Land has been bought for the U.K., France, Australia, and many other countries, it currently sits without U.S. distribution. Which should come as some surprise. Yes, the subject matter is politically fraught, but once upon a time, American film distributors and exhibitors embraced controversy — especially when it came to acclaimed movies whose controversy was inextricably intertwined with their humanity. Are these companies holding back out of budgetary reasons, out of cowardice, out of political disagreement? We may never really know, but Adra’s words that this is a story of power continue to resonate — both when it comes to what’s onscreen, and to the question of whether American audiences will ever get a chance to see this deeply moving documentary.