“No Other Land” — despite being the most internationally awarded documentary film of 2024 and despite its nomination for the Academy Award for Best Documentary — could not find a U.S. distributor due to its subject matter. The film chronicles years of struggle by Palestinians, living in a collection of villages known as Masafer Yatta, constantly facing the unrelenting drive by Israel Occupation Forces to forcefully evict them.
Palestinian activist and journalist Basel Adra, with handheld camera, in a scene from the documentary “No Other Land,” 2024.
The film is set in a mountainous region on the southern tip of the West Bank near the Negev Desert. Over centuries, the Palestinians living there learned to survive on the dry, rocky land, raising herds of goats and flocks of chickens and, when necessary, occupying the many caves that dot the mountainside.
When an Israeli court upheld orders to forcefully remove the Indigenous residents in order to build a military training base on their land, Basel Adra, a 28-year-old Palestinian activist, filmmaker and journalist began to film the resistance to the Israeli occupiers. Working with him was Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who joined the project in support.
An Israeli-Palestinian collective made up of Adra, Abraham, Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor documented the events, relying mostly on how Basel and Yuval experienced them. Their filming took place from the summer of 2019 to October 2023.
In the documentary, Adra uses a small hand-held camera and often his phone’s camera, filming the rocky areas he is running on to be able to capture yet another bulldozing of a villager’s home or to escape the soldiers who seem determined to arrest him.
The film also focuses on the solidarity that forms between Basel and Yuval, while underscoring their divergent lives. As an Israeli, Yuval is free to travel unrestricted. As a Palestinian, Basel has no such freedom, lacking in fundamental rights that Yuval can take for granted. Basel tells Yuval about attending a university to study to become a lawyer, only to realize that Palestinians had no rights in Israeli courts.
Israel’s soldiers torture filmmaker’s family
The documentary begins with Basel recalling being a young child the first time his father was arrested for resisting the Israeli soldiers. Over the course of the film, his older brother Harun is brutally beaten by soldiers, leaving him paralyzed. Near the end of the filming, Basel’s cousin is shot in the stomach from point-blank range by an Israeli settler while soldiers look on and do nothing.
Each time the Israel Occupation Forces come to Masafer Yatta, they bulldoze more homes. At first they give Palestinian residents time to retrieve their belongings, which they move to nearby caves that they have rigged with electricity. As time goes on, more and more homes are destroyed, with belongings and furniture still inside. Toward the end of the filming, at least one house a week is destroyed, along with electrical infrastructures, water wells and pipes. Eventually, many families are forced to pack up their belongings and move away.
Throughout the film, signs of expanding illegal settlements around the area are caught by the cameras. A footnote at the end of the documentary reports that a secret government document was released admitting that the real purpose of the assaults was to prevent Masafer Yatta, an Arab village, from expanding.
Palestinians struggle for education
Interspersed between shots of soldiers bulldozing homes and villagers holding protests in Harun’s name are scenes of the villagers’ struggle to build an elementary school. Although the importance of having opportunities for education is even recognized by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair who visits the school, in the end it is destroyed by Israeli bulldozers.
The filming ended in October 2023, just before the historic uprising in Gaza, where Israel’s incessant bombing deliberately targeted nearly all the schools and universities.
Two days after “No Other Land” was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, Israeli settlers invaded Masafer Yatta, burning and breaking into the homes that still remained.
No Other Land” serves as a forecaster of what was to follow. In 2024, the Israeli army began a campaign to demolish homes and stores in areas of the northern West Bank in and around Jenin. Residents reported that Israeli bulldozers immediately tore out water pipelines. To date, 40,000 Palestinians have been forcibly expelled from three refugee camps in Jenin and Tulkarem; thousands have been injured and hundreds killed, including children.
Although this film has been picked up for distributions in 24 countries, the film has had a limited release in the U.S. due to the lack of a distributor. Since Jan. 31, Cinetic Media has helped the producers secure venues, so it is now going to show in about 100 theaters in the U.S. The producers see the Oscar nomination as an opportunity to raise the film’s profile even more.
If this critically acclaimed film is shown at a theater near you, make sure to see it and bring friends along.