There’s no guidebook for this sort of thing. There are situations where the act of filmmaking itself is deeply courageous. No Other Land is one such act of resilient bravery. Filmed over four years (from 2019 to 2023), the documentary captures the Israeli occupation of Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets along Palestine’s West Bank. The events of the story surround the expulsion of generations of families, as their homes and lifetimes of memories are bulldozed to make way for a training ground for military tanks.
As their homes, schools, and land are destroyed, families stand by, distraught and devastated, as the camera plays over the faces of the children and their elder relatives and we sense the profound generational loss, lives that will never be the same. Perspective is everything and No Other Land is shot from the point of view of the occupied, firmly planted in the plight of their ever-darkening reality. What’s important is that the film is a collaborative work between Palestinian filmmakers Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal and Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
Where will you go, the filmmakers ask a woman, as her home is being demolished. There is no other land, she says. After one man’s home is destroyed, he stays up nights building in secret, and when the occupying force comes and they try to take his building materials, he’s shot point blank. There are moments of intense fear and the feeling of dislocation and disruption permeates every frame.
Significantly, the documentary is shot across various mediums. Sometimes it’s shot on phones, camcorders, or higher-end equipment, and the context of the lens always changes the meaning of what’s being framed. Why someone brings out a camera always tells a story about what they’re filming and how they’re filming it, likewise, revealing everything about what is important to them, but often, also the motives of the subject they are filming.
For the part of the invading Israelis, it’s hard to find any empathy at all. They are clearly just following orders. Their orders are inhumane and ought to be war crimes, if they were not funded by the countries who ought to be monitoring that. There is so much devastating footage here, comparable to The Zone of Interest (2023), in that it’s such a stark view of what can be accepted as orders, when two cultures have become so historically oppositional, and there is not even a shred of humanity left in the consideration of one side’s actions.
No Other Land is equal parts heart-wrenching and utterly profound. This is one of the most moving acts of filmmaking of our times and speaks to a global apathy of this moment, wherein we are all verging on the very dangerous territory of fearing people who are not like us, and wanting to determine who belongs in what space, a globalist issue that’s very much at the center of political divides. When our souls and histories are anchored to one place, there can be no other land, and that’s where No Other Land leaves us, quietly devastated, profoundly moved, and thoroughly inspired by this act of bravery in filmmaking.
Despite having just won Best Documentary at the Academy Awards, No Other Land still has not found distribution in the United States — it’s so charged that nobody will touch it. This is reason enough to seek it out, when it’s available to you, because it is utterly essential.