No Other Land

No Other Land is not the first film made by a team of Israelis and Palestinians working together to document the occupation and destruction of Palestinian homes by Israeli soldiers over an extended period of time. The Oscar-nominated 5 Broken Cameras by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi is probably the most high-profile example, but there are many fictional and non-fiction movies on this subject with this kind of collaboration. Still, this film, which chronicles the destruction of the occupied West Bank's Masafer Yatta region, is one of the most powerful. Much of the picture's impact comes from the distinctive participation and partnership of the four credited writer/editor/directors. Basel Adra, one of the main subjects of the film, is a young Palestinian activist who has been resisting the forced displacement of his people from this region since he was a kid. Yuval Abraham, another protagonist, is a Jewish Israeli journalist covering this struggle. Together with Hamdan Ballal and the film's lead cinematographer, Rachel Szor, they tell the story of this area in the West Bank where Palestinian farmers have lived for many generations and where Israeli soldiers have been tearing down homes and attempting to drive out the inhabitants for many years. The efforts recently stepped up when the Israeli military decided to use the land for training.

The residents of Masafer Yatta, especially Basal's family, have been filming the actions of the Israeli military for over twenty years. When Yuval and Rachel came to Masafer Yatta to write articles and film what was going on there in 2019, they became involved in helping the residents and local activists get their stories out to the larger world. The team operates on the belief that awareness about what is happening will stop the village's destruction and annexation, as occurred for many years after a seven-minute televised visit to Masafer Yatta from Tony Blair back when he was Prime Minister of the UK. The four directors worked together for almost five years, recording copious amounts of footage and combining it with the sizable archive of video from the past decades. The resulting film collapses many years of Israeli bulldozers and earth-movers coming in to demolish homes, schools, wells, and other structures, as well as the subsequent rebuilding these villagers constantly engage in. These scenes are intercut with the developing relationship between Basel and Yuval and how their alliance is tested by their ethnic backgrounds and profoundly different levels of freedom.

Their camera captured countless scenes of soldiers and, eventually, armed settlers encroaching on the land with hostile intent. We witness the military threatening women and children, beating men, confiscating tools the villagers use to rebuild what's been destroyed, and entering Basal's home, removing cameras and hard drives. But the sheer volume of footage this team collected could not be easily erased. The picture is part diary of people living under occupation, part example of how individuals born on opposite sides of a conflict can collaborate, and part condemnation of state policies—the frequent claim of Israeli soldiers, "It's the law," comes across as an even more callus and cowardly excuse for behavior than the old Nazi claim of "I was just following orders."

Though it covers twenty years rather than twenty days, No Other Land recalls the prior year's Oscar-winning documentary feature 20 Days in Mariupol, with its on-the-ground journalists desperately trying to get footage and stories about atrocities out to the world without any assurance that these images and accounts will move the needle of public opinion. Things go from bad to worse over the course of this picture, though the film still holds out hope that things could change with awareness and international action. It is a bleak and sometimes harrowing movie to watch, but it is also inspiring to see these filmmakers staying the course and maintaining their optimism, if only by the strength of their personal connection and commitment to finishing the film and getting it seen.

Despite being one of the year's most acclaimed films, No Other Land could not find a US distributor willing to touch it our the current political climate. The film's Oscar Nomination for Best Documentary Feature gave the filmmakers enough clout to self-distribute in major cities, often in the smaller cinemas of art house theaters like The Film Forum in NYC (where I saw it) and the screening room at Boston's Coolidge Corner Moviehouse (a room so small and cramped I consider it an embarrassment for that theater to charge the same ticket price for a movie slapped onto a smaller screen than many people have in their homes that they do for their expert projection in one of Boston's grandest and most elegant cinemas).