Cinema, at its best, has the potential to be a compassionate, thoughtful, and even revolutionary act. The most powerful films are not just about looking at a place and a people but truly seeing them, taking us deeper into a state of being that far too often can go egregiously overlooked.
Nowhere is this more true than “No Other Land,” the outstanding Oscar-nominated documentary directed by the courageous Palestinian-Israeli filmmaking collective of Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. A devastating profile of the community of Masafer Yatta (a group of Palestinian villages in the West Bank constantly on the brink of destruction), the people living in perpetual uncertainty, and the way state violence consumes entire generations, it’s not just one of the most vital films about the region, but one of the absolute best documentaries to come out this or any year.
Shot from the Summer of 2019 to October 2023, it’s also a film that has not gotten the wide distribution it deserves. Even as it’s received a whole heaping of praise from awards bodies and critics’ groups since it premiered nearly a year ago at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival, its long-overdue theatrical release has come not from a U.S. distributor, but from the producers self-distributing it themselves. One can be glad they did, but there remains an unfortunately fitting sense that the film and the Palestinian people it profiles are still fighting to be seen as they have for decades in a battle against despair itself.
This battle is mostly seen through the young eyes of Basel. A 28-year-old Palestinian activist, filmmaker and journalist, he has spent all of his life living in the shadow of annihilation as the documentary captures how the Israeli military routinely destroys their homes with bulldozers. In every shot where we see these convoys of destruction approaching on the horizon, there is a sense of grim familiarity and impending loss seen in the faces of the people we cut to. It’s a compassionately constructed film — it never looks away from the agony before us, and the subject is of the utmost importance.
For all the ways “No Other Land” is about the mechanized march of cruel repression and the coldly bureaucratic way these attempts at forced displacement take place, it’s critically always centered on the impact on the people themselves. Basel, often both filming this and narrating about the painful trajectories of power in his world, has devoted himself to trying to capture the attention of the world to prevent this destruction from happening. He does so much like his father did, the past echoing into the present with each decisive cut between the two, but the greatest impact of “No Other Land” comes in the moments where everything slows down for him to reflect on what his life has become. The weight he carries, while familiar, is a heavy one.
At the same time, the film is about the solidarity, even friendship, that begins to form between Basel and his co-director Yuval while remaining distinctly aware of just how different their lives are. While each is committed to the film and the shared goal of shining a light on the ongoing crisis, the fact that one is Palestinian and one is Israeli means there are fundamental things one can do that the other cannot. They are so much alike, with warm moments of humor playing out when they just sit together, but Basel is lacking in the fundamental rights and freedoms that Yuval has. When a day of shooting has concluded, one has the choice to return home while the other must stay and ponder what the next day will bring.
The film, delicate yet unblinking, is unafraid to let painful moments between the two linger as these fault lines come into focus. It’s something neither is responsible for, but it alters the fundamental ways they move through the world. When Yuval bemoans how little people seem to care and how slowly things seem to be changing, it is Basel who must remind him, not unkindly, that this is something that has been happening for decades. No matter how much they desperately try, it will not be solved overnight.
As one now watches “No Other Land” with the knowledge that the already fragile ceasefire in Gaza is merely the first step and the fact that the current U.S. administration seems increasingly hellbent on ramping up the cycles of already horrifying violence, the painful tension at its core comes even more to the forefront. What if these filmmakers and their work again go ignored? This is something the film acknowledges both in the confessions that Basel makes to Yuval when they are alone and in the moments where we zoom out to see how disconnected the rest of the world seems to be from what we are witnessing.
It’s a question “No Other Land” can’t resolve and doesn’t try to as there is no easy answer to be found. What is critical is that, in a world of so much chaos, cruelty, and callousness, it speaks with a compassionate clarity about the reality of the situation for so many that cuts through all the noise. The only question now is whether anyone will listen.
“No Other Land” is now playing in theaters.