Around an hour and two minutes into No Other Land, our gaze fixates on the film’s subject, Palestinian activist Basel Adra, lying almost in the fetal position on rough terrain, facing away from the sun. He picks gently at spears of grass as his handheld camera — his armor against Zionist erasure — settles on the ground.
On the horizon behind him is a bulldozer about to tear down Masafer Yatta, a small mountain community in the southern West Bank, which has been under Israeli occupation since the late ‘60s. Adra turns to the earth as his homeland is forcefully effaced from its maps. This image isn’t just the documentary’s poster but its very thesis: inner Palestinian lives refusing to be cleansed by the Zionist project, Israel’s own version of “manifest destiny.”
It’s a frame so stark and contextually rich that my mind keeps drifting to a glaring question: How do we, as movie spectators, wrestle with our distance from images of colonial genocide? How does the act of bearing witness, whether actively or passively, implicate us?
Shot from 2019 until October 2023, the documentary tracks the apartheid conditions long endured by the indigenous populace of Masafer Yatta after the region was declared a military training ground, essentially a proxy for Zionist expansion, in 1980. The situation prompted a legal battle in Israeli courts, which issued a decision in May 2022 formalizing the forceful removal of the Palestinian natives from their homes. With testimonials, archival footage, and news clips as some of its visual paraphernalia, No Other Land heightens this friction into a larger, more complex portrait of the century-long Palestinian struggle.
The picture premiered at the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Berlinale Documentary Film Award. It went on to rack up acclaim from festival juries, audiences, and critics, including a rare best documentary/non-fiction sweep at the National Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the New York Film Critics Circle. This year, it won the Best Documentary Feature at the 97th Academy Awards.
Despite this, the film remains untouched by major U.S. distributors and streamers, forcing its producers to self-distribute. But the film being denied wider screenings in the U.S. isn’t shocking at all, considering its government’s role in the genocide. ($17.9 billion in military aid, per a recent study by Brown University’s Watson Institute, has been sent to Israel by Joe Biden’s administration since October 2023.)
If anything, it’s a concession to a reactionary film economy that only ever crusades for a movie’s politics so long as it is taken within the vacuous context of cinematic experience. Meaning, the actual political realities of the making of the movie, the people behind it, and its subject must work solely as rhetorical shorthand; and the spectator must remain passive.
That No Other Land is helmed by a team of Palestinian (Adra and Hamdan Ballal) and Israeli (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor) directors, featuring Adra and Abraham as its protagonists, is a site of meaning on its own. As the movie tracks Israel’s Apartheid policies, it also trains the camera on the unlikely friendship between Adra and Abraham — the former a law student in a land that doesn’t recognize his right to exist, the latter a journalist growing impatient with the response to the unspeakable carnage he’s witnessing; one has no safety net, the other does.
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