No Other Land review – powerful Israel-Palestine documentary is essential viewing

It’s difficult to review No Other Land, a documentary by a group of Palestinian and Israeli activist film-makers on the destruction of villages in the West Bank, on a formal level. The usual rubric for evaluating non-fiction cinema does not really extend to films whose existence was actively challenged throughout filming, whose makers’ equipment and livelihood were constantly at risk. A good portion of the film, which was selected for this year’s New York film festival and won best documentary at the Berlin film festival (to politicized charges of antisemitism and death threats against its makers), is composed of amateur video footage by Basel Adra, who began filming the Israeli occupation of his village in Masafer Yatta at the age of 15, in the name of evidence.

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That evidence put forth by the directors – Adra, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, Palestinian film-maker and farmer Hamdan Ballal and Israeli cinematographer and editor Rachel Szor – is straightforward, un-sensationalized and completely infuriating. There is nothing to say that has not already been said on the case for Palestinian sovereignty, the war crimes of the Israeli government and the moral clarity of those who call for an end to violence and occupation. No Other Land, should it make it to theaters – the film is, perhaps unsurprisingly, still seeking distribution in the US – ensures that people cannot deny it; that there exists a model of coexistence and mutual safety between Palestinians and Israelis; and that there is no justification for the campaign of wanton destruction and despair in the West Bank, just as in Gaza and now Lebanon.

“I started filming when we started to end,” says Adra in Arabic voiceover at the film’s outset. Through his testimony as well as his father’s, No Other Land summarily details both bucolic daily life for the mostly agrarian communities in Masafer Yatta, a collection of 20 Palestinian villages in the mountainous southern edge of the West Bank, and the generational fight to maintain it against increasingly violent Israeli occupation. The film is forthright if almost too succinct on the facts: in 1980, the Israeli government declared Masafer Yatta a “closed area” for military training, though government documents reveal that the real purpose was to displace Palestinian villagers for illegal Israeli settlements.

Adra was born into a family of activists, in a village declared off-limits to Palestinians, whose residents allied with an Israeli legal group to protest against their forced expulsion. The film picks up in 2022 when, after a 22-year legal battle, the Israeli high court dubiously rules in favor of eviction, beginning an official campaign of destruction that Adra and his cohort capture in damning, persistent, mundane detail. Much of the 95-minute film takes place in Arabic or Hebrew, with occasional interludes of western news coverage, to which Adra and Abraham have sometimes contributed. (For transparency: Abraham has reported for the Guardian on Israeli intelligence agencies’ decade-long campaign to surveil, hack, pressure, smear and allegedly threaten senior international criminal court staff in an effort to derail the court’s inquiries.)

No Other Land proceeds in increasingly dire chapters, as Adra continues his work of recording Israeli incursions on Masafer Yatta villagers, posting undeniable scenes of occupation to social media: bulldozers pulverizing family homes as children cry, a backhoe pointedly destroying a family’s toilet, officials stealing another family’s generator, police filling wells with cements. IDF soldiers – Black, Arab, white, male and female – who do not flash a hint of vulnerability, who carry out the home demolitions with the coolness of its legal order. Families forced to huddle in caves while they attempt to rebuild rudimentary structures at night. “We have no other land, that’s why we suffer for it,” says one older woman after her home is destroyed. The woman’s son is later shot and paralyzed by Israeli forces, one of several acts of physical violence captured by the film-makers.

None of this is new, for anyone paying attention (and so often the failure is attention). But what Adra, Abraham, Ballal and Szor have created is a clear case and a model in its specificity. The protest scenes are bookended by taut, remarkably natural-seeming conversations between Adra and Abraham on the mutual suspicion, complications and necessity of Palestinian-Israeli connections that evince a winsome, hard-won trust; the film subtly explores the power imbalance between Adra, whose movement is restricted, and Abraham, who can drive away at night.

In an early scene, filmed in 2019, Adra and his community express hope that the US will exert enough pressure on Israel to stop the expulsion, a reasonable enough notion that now feels heartbreakingly quaint. It’s a condemnation of western complicity as damning as anything said in far blunter terms in the many protests abroad. By the film’s end, just a few years later, Adra and Abraham discuss the utility of reaching people beyond the region – so you touch someone, and then what? Conditions have only deteriorated since filming was completed in October 2023; emboldened by Israel’s war in Gaza, extremist settlers have evicted 16 Palestinian villages in the West Bank in the past year. The film’s last recorded image is of a group of rogue settlers approaching Masafer Yatta with guns. But No Other Land, for its many images of despair, still offers a stirring vision for what could be – Israelis and Palestinians working together in the name of justice, collaborating toward a world where both are free.

• No Other Land is screening at the New York film festival and will be released in the UK on 8 November and Australia on 21 November, with a US date to be announced