“No Other Land” filmmakers Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham revised their official directors statement after being criticized by the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), a watchdog group, for not explicitly naming Israel as the perpetrator of “ethnic cleansing, settler-colonialism and apartheid.”
The group’s lengthy response to the film was published March 3, the day after it won Best Documentary at the 97th annual Academy Awards. As an affiliate of the BDS Movement of boycotts, divestments and economic sanctions against Israel, the group said the film was in violation of BDS guidelines and weighed a boycott.
The revised statement from Adra, who is a Palestinian journalist, and Abraham, an Israeli journalist, was updated to read: “We’re making this film together, as a Palestinian-Israeli collective, because we desperately want to stop the Israeli-led ongoing ethnic cleansing of the community of Masafer Yatta, and because we want to resist the reality of Apartheid we were born into — from opposite, unequal, sides.”
The statement continues: “Life in our land is becoming scarier, more violent, more oppressive, every day — and we feel helpless, fighting against very powerful systems of control.” They add that the film is “not only proof of Israeli settler-colonial war crimes taking place in the present, but also a proposal for the future, a search for a path towards justice and equality and an end to Apartheid.”
Representatives for the film declined TheWrap’s request for comment, but PACBI said that the updated “Israeli-led” language to the directors statement was added after their March 3 release.
Elsewhere in its release, which was widely critical of the documentary project and maintained that it “is in violation of BDS guidelines,” PACBI stated that the film, which depicts the attacks on the Masafer Yatta community in the West Bank, makes the idea of Israeli “occupation, apartheid, and settler colonialism” seem “normal and establishing normal relations with the Israeli regime.”
PACBI’s statement against “No Other Land” also appeared critical that the project was made in collaboration with Israeli talent and companies. “Palestinians do not need validation, legitimation or permission from Israelis to narrate our history,” they said, adding that it is “imperative” to “challenge the racist conditions, whether covert or overt, imposed by the colonial West and its hegemonic institutions, which do not platform Palestinians except with the permission or validation of Israelis.”
PACBI did praise the documentary for “exposing an important, if partial, dimension of Israel’s system of colonial oppression [and] Israel’s crimes, such as the ethnic cleansing of Masafer Yatta,” but argued that the film uses “normalization to whitewash genocide.”
Since its Oscar win, the film has also been heavily criticized by Israelis, including culture and sports minister Miki Zohar, who called the film’s Oscar win “a sad moment for the world of cinema” and said it represented the “defamation of Israel.”
In a guest column for TheWrap, writer and producers Golan Ramraz and Guy Goldstein called for the film’s Academy Award to be rescinded, dismissing the movie as “a piece of propaganda draped in the trappings of journalism.”
“No Other Land” does not yet have an American distributor. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called on U.S. film companies and streaming services to pursue this Oscar-winning documentary and “quickly make it available to the American public.”
“The American people deserve the right to see this film,” CAIR said.
