No Other Land isn't just the most powerful nonfiction film I saw in 2024; it also had one of the year's more remarkable off-screen narratives. The movie brings us into Masafer Yatta, a community of Palestinian villages in the Israeli-occupied southern West Bank, which is being bulldozed by the Israeli military to make room for a tank training ground.
Since it premiered early last year, the film has won numerous prizes at international festivals and from American critics' groups; recently, it received an for best documentary feature. For all its acclaim, though, No Other Land has yet to find an official U.S. distributor. That's both surprising and not surprising, given the industry's anxiety when it comes to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and the directness with which this movie confronts it.
Even so, No Other Land will be playing select theatres across the country over the next month at least, and it deserves to be widely seen. It began shooting in 2019 and wrapped in October 2023, and so it feels in some ways like a pre- time capsule of the West Bank.
It was directed by a team consisting of two Palestinian filmmakers, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, and two Israeli filmmakers, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. During the production, Basel, an activist and journalist who grew up in Masafer Yatta, became good friends with Yuval, a Jerusalem-based journalist who was covering the demolitions. Their relationship provides the movie's dramatic core.
Part of the unexpected charm of No Other Land is that it sometimes plays like a verit茅 buddy movie, as Basel and Yuval navigate the initial awkwardness of their cross-cultural friendship. Yuval pitches in with efforts to rebuild homes, taking some good-natured ribbing for not being the handiest of helpers.
When Yuval complains that his articles about the conflict aren't getting enough clicks, Basel gently calls him out: "You are enthusiastic, like you want to end the occupation in 10 days," he says. "This has been going on for decades." Nonetheless, Basel knows the importance of the role that journalism can play, and his and Yuval's combined efforts do succeed in drawing international media attention.
One of the major figures in No Other Land is Basel's father, Nasser, who has been arrested numerous times for protesting 鈥� an activist legacy that he has now passed on to his son. Basel says he feels ambivalent about inheriting that legacy and the exhaustion of having to spend your whole life fighting to protect your home.
The footage shot by Basel and his colleagues nonetheless shows just how important that fight is. We see Palestinian families frantically evacuating mere minutes before their homes are destroyed, then moving their possessions into nearby caves. We see farm animals wandering in confusion from their demolished coops and pens, and children playing amid the ruins, as children in war zones often do.
Sometimes Basel is in front of the camera, marching in a protest or, at one point, screaming as he's dragged on the ground by IDF soldiers. Often he's behind the camera; he keeps filming even amid the chaos, including one gut-wrenching moment when a Palestinian man is shot at point-blank range by an Israeli settler.
At one point, Basel says, "This is a story about power." And we see how that power plays out in different ways. The filmmakers include footage from years earlier, when then-U.K. Prime Minister visited the region; he spent just a few minutes touring Masafer Yatta. Shortly thereafter, Israel called off demolitions in the area.
There's also a power differential, of course, between Basel and Yuval. When No Other Land won two awards last February at the Berlin International Film Festival, the filmmakers took the stage together, and Yuval said, in his acceptance speech: "In two days we will go back to a land where we are not equal" 鈥� and he added that this inequality has to end. How it could end is not a question that No Other Land can answer. But as an example of Palestinian-Israeli collaboration in action, Basel and Yuval and the vital movie they've made give us reason to hope.
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