No documentary this season has been more talked about or acclaimed than “No Other Land,” which chronicles the besieged community of Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank as Israeli forces demolish residents’ homes and expel families from the land they have lived in for generations, claiming the area is needed for a military training ground.
Directed by the Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal alongside the Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, “No Other Land” has received critical acclaim and collected many honors on the festival circuit. After winning the best documentary award at its Berlin International Film Festival premiere last February, the film also earned the same prize at the Gotham Awards and from major critics’ groups in New York and Los Angeles. Just weeks ago, it received an Oscar nomination.
Still, no American studio has been willing to pick up this hot-button film, even though distributors typically spend this time of year eagerly boasting about their Oscar-nomination tallies.
“I still think it’s possible, but we’ll have to see,” Abraham told me last week. “It’s clear that there are political reasons at play here that are affecting it. I’m hoping that at a certain point the demand for the film will become so clear and indisputable that there will be a distributor with the kind of courage to take it on and show it to the audience.”
In the meantime, the directors have embarked on a self-distribution plan that has put “No Other Land” into 23 U.S. theaters; on the back of strong box office, it will continue to roll out into additional cities over the coming weeks.
Adra and Abraham are not just part of the film’s directing team, but its two primary subjects. The 28-year-old Adra was raised in Masafer Yatta and has been documenting the forced expulsion since he was a teenager. Over the course of the film, he builds a strong but tense bond with Abraham, who lives in Jerusalem but travels frequently to Masafer Yatta to write about the situation there for an Israeli audience.
The two men spoke to me last week on a video call as they gathered at Adra’s house in Masafer Yatta. “I really want to say something very personal because even with the success of ‘No Other Land,’ things have kept getting very bad,” said Adra, who detailed how his village was once again attacked by armed settlers in the weeks before the Oscar nominations were announced.
The filmmakers hope that if anything can come of this awards campaign, it’s an increased global awareness of the fraught situation in Masafer Yatta. To that end, they still dream of a U.S. distributor that will help “No Other Land” reach an even bigger audience.
“We worked five years on this and Basel risked his life — I saw him almost get shot two times or three times,” said Abraham. “It’s just a minimal amount of courage to give it the stage that we believe it deserves, that the people of Masafer Yatta deserve. But we still hope that it’ll change.”
Here are edited excerpts from our conversation.
You made this film with the intention of inspiring change in Masafer Yatta. How do you fight the feeling of discouragement when it feels as though things are getting worse?
BASEL ADRA When I reach a moment where I’m disappointed and hopeless, the people around me and especially those people who kept losing their homes [keep me going]. For example, one of the people who lost their home, this is the sixth time since 2018 his house has been demolished and he rebuilt it, and this gives me some strength. Why would I give up while people want to stay in the land and fight?
And the other thing is I honestly believe this injustice can’t last forever. Whatever power is against us, at the end of the day if it’s oppressing us in an immoral way, it can’t last. I don’t know what would be the end of this or how it can be, but I have faith that this can’t continue forever, so for that, we have to keep fighting.
YUVAL ABRAHAM There is obviously a strong feeling of discouragement, but I look at Basel who’s living a much more difficult life than myself and as long as he’s continuing, I feel like I also have to continue. Even if the reality is only changing for the worse, it’s not as if we know what would happen if there is no documentation — I think it’s fair to assume that it would be even more horrible than it is. So, I feel like this task of documenting continues to be very pressing.
When the two of you first met, how long did it take to sense that this was someone you could trust and collaborate with?
ABRAHAM We realized quickly that we share similar values politically. Of course, there are immense differences. I am under civilian law and Basel is under military law, which means he’s blacklisted. He cannot enter Jerusalem and visit me there, I always have to come to him. This structural inequality affects us in the most personal way: It affected how we made the film, it affects how we can travel abroad, how we would go to the Oscars, even. It’s everywhere.
Laws are made that he cannot affect. He’s never voted in his life and it’s such a stark difference: Essentially, I vote for the government that at the end of the day is not only controlling Basel’s life, but destroying it.
What was the hardest thing about the years you spent making the film?
ABRAHAM The hardest thing was really terror and fear. You are filming situations where at any point someone can be shot, executed. A settler can come down from the outpost, for example, and we show this at the end of our film: The settler just shoots Basel’s cousin in the stomach from point-blank range while a soldier is looking and then he walks slowly — casually, almost — back to the outpost. And that person is still free. He’s maybe 100 meters away from us, and he can come back down to the village and do it again.
ADRA For me, there was a very terrifying moment when I was filming nearby and a group of soldiers came to destroy [the house of] our neighbor. I tried to document that in video and I was dragged and beaten up furiously by soldiers for half an hour or more, and they were trying to take me to their car. There was the feeling that this was for revenge, not arrest or interrogation, because there was nothing even according to all their racist laws to charge me with.
Also, I was once filming a huge number of masked settlers — between 60 to 80 — who were vandalizing one of the small villages nearby here. They were moving from one home to another, smashing windows and cars and even individuals. I managed to film a few minutes of this attack before they recognized that I’m filming them, and between 10 to 15 of these settlers started to run after me. That was also a really, really hard moment, but luckily I was able to be faster than them and escape.
ABRAHAM Basel runs really quickly.
The film was largely finished before the Hamas attack on Israel in 2023. How did that impact your work?
ABRAHAM It made me feel a sense of urgency for what we are doing, because we’ve been working for years before Oct. 7. A big part of our work was to tell the world and especially the United States that the situation on the ground is not sustainable. And I think today when you hear [President] Trump openly talking about ethnic cleansing, when you see how the Gaza Strip was annihilated with U.S. weapons, when I look at how much we lack a constructive and pragmatic political solution that can take us out of this place that we are in, I feel it’s more urgent than it has ever been before.
Talk to me about the path that led to self-distribution. What were you hearing from the studios that were unwilling to acquire the film?
ABRAHAM Our sales agents were touch with them all the time, and the general impression we got is that people say it’s a great film and it’s well-crafted, but the decision to acquire it doesn’t happen. We were always optimistic that each time the film’s profile becomes higher and it’s clearer that there is a big demand for the film, that it would happen. But after Berlin it didn’t happen. Then we began winning awards and getting distribution everywhere else in the world, and it didn’t happen. And then, the Oscar nomination, and it still didn’t happen.
Eventually, we said, “OK, we can’t just continue to wait indefinitely.” In the U.S., so many people are writing us, “How can we watch it?” So we decided to do the theatrical release independently, and it’s now going to show in about 100 theaters in the U.S. For me, the Oscar is mainly an opportunity to even raise the film’s profile more. And I do not lose hope that there will be some distributor who will take it on.
How did you learn of the Oscar nomination?
ADRA The four of us were here in the same room, and we came together to watch it live on YouTube. They said “No Other Land” and everybody jumped from the chair. It’s something we didn’t think about. I never imagined, “We’ll be nominated for the Oscar.”
ABRAHAM It was nice to have a moment of happiness because the reality on the ground is only becoming worse. Hamdan’s house can be basically destroyed at any moment. It has a demolition order on it, so it’s not connected to the electricity line or the water line, and now he’s trying to get a visa to go to the United States and to come to the Oscars as a nominee.
Just to apply for the visa, he has to travel to another country, in Jordan, because the U.S. has no way for Palestinians who are living under occupation in the West Bank to apply. It’s like two weeks left and we don’t know will he even be able to travel. And if he travels to this amazing event, it is such a huge opportunity on the one hand, but then on the other hand, returning to the reality here on the ground is so different. There is such a dissonance.
You’ve continued filming since the release of “No Other Land.” Do you feel there may be another documentary in you about this?
ADRA I don’t know, to be honest, because this took so long and wasn’t easy to work on. But we are not just filming for moviemaking but also to document the actions, the attacks, the violations around us. I use some of this for social media, for human rights organizations, sometimes for the occupation courts. My father faced false claims by settlers and I had videos of that specific incident where they claimed that he throws stones, but my footage showed the opposite and I had to show it to the judge.
ABRAHAM We’re continuing to do our work together, and we’re still working as journalists as well. But for now, we’re focused on trying to make the most of this moment with this film.
Basel, you’ve married since you worked on the film, right?
ADRA Yes. Since one year now.
In the movie, you describe how your parents taught you about activism and the importance of documenting the situation in your homeland. As you start a family, do you think that is something you will impart to your own children?
ADRA I hope I will not need to do that and the situation will change and we’ll have a different life. I have a daughter now also, she’s just one month old, and I really hope that she and the generation that comes don’t need to do this and they will have better a better future. But if it continues to be the same way, I don’t know. I don’t have the answer.
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