Directors: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor
Writers: Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor
Stars: Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal
Synopsis: Made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, this documentary shows the destruction of the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta by Israeli authorities and the unlikely friendship that blossoms between Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham.
On the morning of September 20, as I walked toward Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater for my first New York Film Festival press screening of the day, I came upon a post on X/Twitter that referenced one of the films on my docket. “Heads up @TheNYFF press and industry,” Film Workers for Palestine wrote. “When you attend today’s 4:45 screening of NO OTHER LAND, you should know what is happening to Basel Adra, one of its directors. it happens in the film and it continues to happen, today. this horror can be stopped, and it must.” Their tweet was quoting a post by Adra himself – the film’s primary subject in addition to being one its four co-directors – featuring a photo of a blindfolded man sitting outside a small building, with a group of soldiers gathered around the corner. “This morning several occupation soldiers invaded my home and kidnapped my father toward the illegal Havat Maon outpost,” Adra wrote at 3:00 a.m. EST. Six hours later, he followed up: “I’m showing our documentary No Other Land in the NY Film Festival this week, about my dad and our life under occupation in Masafer Yatta [Adra’s home in Palestine]. Things only got worse since we made it: Today my dad was kidnapped by soldiers, blindfolded, tied for hours inside a settlement for no reason.” The picture in the post is zoomed in even further than the first; his father, blindfolded and bound, is front and center.
https://x.com/basel_adra/status/1837116574563529082
For the remainder of the day, through showings of two post-mortem works from Jean Luc Godard, the debut narrative feature from Neo Sora, and a hallucinatory medieval drama by Athena Rachel Tsangari, these pictures and posts endured in my mind as painful reminders of the horrifying reality that has persisted in the West Bank since long before the Israeli-Palestinian conflict resurfaced in the current zeitgeist. It did so, primarily, through mainstream media’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas war that began in October of last year, a conflict that led people to choose sides over which country’s people were more deserving of death. Yet those mental images hardly capture the events that unfold over the course of No Other Land, a desperate flare disguised as a documentary that is almost entirely made up of footage collected by the directing collective of Adra (a Palestinian filmmaker), Yuval Abraham (an Israeli investigative journalist), Hamdan Ballal (a Palestinian filmmaker), and Rachel Szor (an Israeli filmmaker) – all first-time directors who also co-edited the film. While the film partially spotlights the unlikely bond between Adra and Abraham, which was forged when the latter traveled to Masafer Yatta, a grouping of 19 small Palestinian settlements in the southern West Bank, to cover the atrocities being committed by his own country’s military, much of its runtime features firsthand accounts of said atrocities, from video of Israeli troops tearing down a primary school as captured on Adra’s camera and/or cellphone to accounts from Masafer Yatta’s citizens, many of whom have seen their homes destroyed in order for the military to build yet another training ground on their land.
That’s precisely what Adra and co. expose, though to anyone whose head has been above ground for the last few years, the footage seen here should come as no surprise. Not that a general grasp of international politics makes No Other Land any less harrowing. The film begins with Adra’s voice, as he recalls his first memory: When he was five years old, he was awoken by flashing lights and loud voices, as police raided his home and arrested his father for the first time. He then rattles off his first memory of a protest, the moment he recognized that his parents were activists. “My father is invincible,” he says, speaking to the mindset he once held. Whenever the film isn’t explicitly trained on conversations, arguments, or full-on terrorism in which we can hear multiple parties having a person-to-person exchange, Adra serves as the film’s voiceover track. He notes things like, “The place you were born in, you can never forget,” and “This is a story about power,” a remark made in reference to the one time Tony Blair, the former prime minister of the United Kingdom, walked through Masafer Yatta for seven minutes, an act that saw the cancellation of multiple demolition orders. Essentially, if a past world leader comes to town, the Army packs up shop. If not, they bulldoze a family’s home, telling a mother whose daughters remain inside, “It doesn’t matter. Move.”
What may stick with audiences most, though, is one of Adra’s first expositional statements: “I started filming when we started to end.” It was the summer of 2019 when he first trained his camera on the crimes against humanity being committed by camouflaged vessels in his hometown, those who have a similar frame to that of a human being yet no soul to be found. It was also when Abraham initially arrived in Masafer Yatta to work on his first story, only to be met with a significant amount of understandable reticence. After all, an Israeli journalist entering Palestinian lands as they are being ripped from the clutches of those who call them home doesn’t exactly inspire an urge to share detailed reports of the cruelty from which they’ve suffered. But the dynamic soon softens, first in the Adra household, as Basel’s father welcomes Abraham into their home for tea, leading to Basel and Yuval’s working relationship. Others from the village, however, don’t warm to Abraham’s presence as easily; one man asks, “Arabs build for you, and you destroy for them. Why, Yuval?” He’s unable to believe that anyone from Israel could possibly have a dissenting opinion to that of their country’s armed forces. This particular argument continues over the course of the film, as the two work together on manual tasks around Masafer Yatta, airing their disagreements and common ground in an effort to further understand one another. It’s one of a few charming anecdotal elements scattered throughout an otherwise gutting film.
That being said, the film’s other lighter moments always seem to come in the aftermath of hardship. Adra, Abraham, and others wear party hats, blow up balloons, and listen to music one night, but it’s in celebration of Basel’s father being released from yet another arrest, a recurrent concern that, evidently, continues to this day. Adra and Abraham can joke about how insignificant Abraham’s deadlines are in comparison to the things happening outside their front door, only for their cameras to capture the near-murder of one of Adra’s family friends moments later. It feels wrong to judge a film of this nature on a critical basis simply because of how imperative and pertinent its very existence is, but No Other Land masters its tonal balance and deploys its vérité style so authentically that it is sure to stand out amidst a slew of talking head-heavy documentaries that attempt to posit a general understanding of these issues rather than making an effort to truly witness them. Of course, it’s no privilege for Adra, Abraham, Ballal, and Szor to be so close to the scene, but it does make for a film that feels more indispensable than anything to come before or after. Frankly, nothing has compared, and nothing will. If you have a pulse, it should be considered required viewing.
A few facts: No Other Land will have played in eight film festivals since its Berlinale premiere in February once it screens on Oct. 3 at the 29th Busan International Film Festival. Critics have adorned it as one of the year’s best films and have called it, almost universally, the year’s best documentary. Starting on Nov. 1, it will begin a one-week qualifying run at New York’s Film at Lincoln Center – the home of the New York Film Festival, the seventh of those eight aforementioned showcases – and therefore will be eligible for consideration at the Oscars and will undoubtedly see it land on many year-end best-of lists. Even still, the film lacks distribution; a day after Adra’s post, IndieWire’s David Ehrlich took to Twitter to say, “I’ve talked to so many distributors I won’t name who think this movie is incredible but for whatever reason won’t release it (even though one told me today it’s a slam-dunk Best Doc nomination)… someone/anyone step up.”
It’s true that the courageous Israeli-Palestinian collective behind this work of activism – because it’s more than just a film – have made a movie that hovers above any other documentary I’ve seen this year, and, in many ways, is the best thing I’ve seen all year. But it’s more than great, transcendent, essential, or whatever other distinction one wishes to apply to it in their assessment. No Other Land is a series of shattering images and acts that directs a flood light toward the malicious acts one nation’s militia is happy to execute in order to punish another, from soldiers teaming to fill a water well with cement to the film’s final frames, which feature perhaps the most vicious of all crimes committed on screen over 95 minutes. It can be strangely hopeful: Abraham was willing to risk his own life, defying his government in order to aid innocent people in their fight against injustice; Adra, meanwhile, remains in Masafer Yatta, continuing to organize efforts to save his home despite the many attacks it continues to suffer from outside forces. Yet that hope, as it attempts to creep into the frame throughout, is swiftly swept aside, another demolition unfolding down the road, gunfire ringing through the fills from a nearby settlement. “We need people to make a change,” Adra says late in the film. “They watch something, they’re touched. Then what?” Perhaps turning No Other Land into a document that is eternal as it is vital could get the ball rolling. So, step up. Someone. Anyone.
