It feels impossible to talk about No Other Land in any way which doesn’t short-change the thing that it actually is.
Don’t get it twisted, that isn’t a bad thing. This is a film that evades conventional notions of promotion and summary. It is largely a thing in itself. Simply put, this isn’t the kind of movie it would lead you to believe it is.
I’ll frame it this way; the film’s log line is as follows:
For half a decade, Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist, films his community of Masafer Yatta being destroyed by Israel's occupation, as he builds an unlikely alliance with an Israeli journalist who wants to join his fight.
The synopsis elaborates on this premise at greater length, teasing out the asymmetrical dynamic between Adra and co-star and creator Yuval Abraham, building anticipation in the would-be viewer that this is a story of an unlikely allyship; of camaraderie built across opposite sides of an armed occupation.
This vision of the film comes off as very 2016—Liberal in the classical sense; the type of story that would have been told in a bygone time prior to a decade of bombardments on Gaza and demolition in the West Bank facilitated by the continued backslide of the West into fascistic populism under the Trump and Biden administrations.
In actuality, No Other Land is anything but. For as much as the film’s subjects routinely point out the intrinsic inequity of Abraham enjoying full Israeli citizenship and the freedom of movement and determination it accords, the budding friendship between him and Adra is but one dimension of the film’s identity.
I say “identity” in part because I hesitate to ascribe No Other Land specific meaning as we traditionally conceive of it. This is not a movie “about” a friendship between a Palestinian and an Israeli journalist in the same way that it is not a movie “about” the occupation of the West Bank.
It is not trying to narrativize a polished and palatable story to be digested by an audience in the Imperial core. Rather, it documents in plain and simple terms a series of abject atrocities enabled and sustained by a rapacious military regime. What narrative it contains—inasmuch as we might think of it as such—emerges as a product of these conditions rather than a conceit of their motion-picture presentation.
This film is not trying to make an argument about why you should empathize with the Palestinian people. You have eyes.
You are human, you have a heart—you should know.
Morbidly, this movie is effective precisely because the average member of a contemporary audience has likely borne witness to the systematized ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip for the past eighteen months.
For as much as the ending title card “We finished this movie in October of 2023” hangs heavy over the project as a whole, they are equally the reason it needs no introduction. This movie can forego justifying the argument of its own existence precisely because its audience has been deprogrammed in a way they simply would not have been ten or twenty years ago.
By no fault of its own, No Other Land exists at a truly perverse intersection of “right” time and place and while that should in no way detract from the film’s admitted quality, it is a necessary admission of both an honest critic and audience, in my mind.
The State of Israel is a presence which lurks largely unseen throughout the movie, but as people possessive of social media accounts and smartphones we know all too well that it exists just outside the frame. The state apparatus is never revealed in full; no Israeli officials are interviewed; and almost no footage is shot on location within its borders.
Rather, Israel’s presence is implied through the violence it inflicts, both directly and indirectly, in the vessels through which it inflicts said violence. The most recurring symbols of Israel throughout the film are those of the bulldozer, and the soldier.
At a moment’s notice, footage will show a convoy cresting a hill, soldiers spilling out of black-painted SUVs, and CASE wheel loaders tearing through the cinderblocks of Palestinian homes.
These moments are punctuated by frenetic hand-cam work, volleys of words exchanged in Arabic and Hebrew, and Palestinians—often with Adra and Abraham alongside them—shouting protests in the face of an unwavering foreman tacced out in a Nike polo shirt and wraparound Oakleys.
What stands out is the banality of the way in which said atrocities are carried out. To the Israelis, this is merely another day at work.
Just as soon as they’d come, they depart, marked by a shot of the convoy retreating back into the sunset as those whose lives they’ve destroyed are left to pick up the pieces.
Displaced citizens take to living in caves, sneaking out in the dead of night to rebuild their former homes piecemeal. What’s striking about the night shots is how, miles to the West, the lights of Jerusalem shine out over the darkness of the West Bank.
It’s an apt visual metaphor for the way in which those in Palestine have been systematically deprived of everything. While those in the cities—in Israel—enjoy a world of bright lights, clean water, electricity, the West Bank slowly regresses through concerted the concerted depreciation efforts of soldiers who come to impound Palestinian cars one week, confiscate a generator another, fill a village’s only well with concrete the next.
Most of No Other Land, however, is comprised of those quiet moments in between as the people of Masafer Yatta try to contend with their circumstances, making the best of an impossible and unlivable situation.
It’s in these moments that voice and dialogue—chaotic and indecipherable during the sequences of forced displacement and eviction—come to the fore. In the absence of the gut-wrenching tension of bulldozers, protests, and firefights, we’re left to watch Adra and Abraham just talk about all they have experienced.
It contextualizes and underpins all that we’ve seen in a natural way. These are two young men in exceptional circumstances who nonetheless maintain “ordinary” concerns. Abraham asks Adra if he thinks they’ll ever get married; Adra expresses apprehension, as so many of us do, at the idea he might wind up being in some way like his father.
These moments where the camera keeps rolling don’t detract from the overall effectiveness of the film. If anything, they absolutely cement it.
If No Other Land is “about” anything in some particular sense, it is about this—documenting. Documenting as means of resistance, as truth-telling, and as practice.
For as much as the film exists to document the systemic displacement and injustices facing the people of Palestine, it is also a movie about documenting them. This is, to me, the single most striking thing about the film, what makes it stick with me as a journalist, and what connects it implicitly to a body of work preoccupied with both the critical documentation of injustice, but also with how we document injustice.
In a scathing feature for Wired, speculative science-fiction author William Gibson declared Singapore “Disneyland With the Death Penalty,” contrasting the city-state’s hyper-cleanly and contemporary aesthetic with its vicious repression of free expression and political dissent.
As I watched No Other Land, I found myself subconsciously turning variations on this sentiment over in my head to try and prescribe to Israel.
I'd toyed initially with the phrase "Silicon Valley with the Castle Doctrine," a glib reference to the Israeli settlers that are filmed wearing khaki shorts, kevlar, and brandishing American M4 Assault Rifles such that they look like Rhodesian homesteaders with crypto portfolios.
The shots of the settlements in which they reside—fascistically suburban in their aesthetic, and built directly across from the rubble where Palestinian villages used to stand—are among the most effective in all the film. Without words they manage to articulate the profound disdain one must doubtlessly possess to willingly choose to live in a community built atop the ruin of other’s livelihood and lives.
However, as opposed to the soft-power authoritarianism of Singapore’s obsessively curated image, the thoughtless displays of military force confer Israel membership to a much earlier manifestation of the same colonial lineage.
In Israel, the lines of wealth, race, and nationality are made political and highly stratified. Palestinians are expelled and confined to the periphery while those who systemically disenfranchise and depersonalize them govern from the comfort of executive chairs in the legislature and the courtroom.
The country’s origins as a British Imperial Mandate are not hard to see for those paying attention; in many ways it operates like a version of the British East India Company that exports laptops and Reaper drones as opposed to tea.
This is the reality No Other Land asks us to confront. On the level of technical execution, the film is deft and masterful. On the level of subject matter, it remains urgently relevant today.
At the risk of playing too much inside baseball, I’ll say that in my four years of doing ReFrame Reviews, I’ve had to grin and bear some films I didn’t particularly enjoy, much less that I thought deserved talking about.
No Other Land is not one of those cases. This film is phenomenal. Few times have I ever been as impressed with a documentary as I was with this one.
That this movie was nominated for Best Documentary Film at the 97th Academy Awards speaks to its importance as a landmark in a cultural and political shift of inestimable and tectonic importance.
The existence of this film speaks to a hope that a better world is possible.
May we one day watch it in a free Palestine.
No Other Land is screening Saturday, January 25th, at 2:15 PM in-person at Showplace Theatre and is presented in partnership with Faculty4Palestine-Trent University Chapter, Students4Palestine Trent, Nogojiwanong Palestine Solidarity (N2P), and Jews 4 Free Palestine.
The film will be followed by a panel in Cogeco Studio (downstairs at Showplace) titled “Human Rights, Solidarity, and Resistance (from Turtle Island to Palestine)” featuring Karen Isaacs, Aseel Zahran, Mohammad Al-Hroub, and Feyzi Baban, and moderated by Peter Boullata.
You can purchase tickets for No Other Land here. You can reserve or purchase in-person tickets for the panel following the film here.
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A rich text element can be used with static or dynamic content. For static content, just drop it into any page and begin editing. For dynamic content, add a rich text field to any collection and then connect a rich text element to that field in the settings panel. Voila!
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