No Other Land (filmreview)

Two months ago, I saw No Other Land in a large movie theatre in Brussels. No Other Land is a documentary made by a team of two Palestinians and two Israeli.

We follow their reporting on the years-long destruction of Masafer Yatta, a village on the Palestinian Westbank, by Israeli forces. The Israeli State, backed up by its army, orders the villagers to leave the land because the land will be used by the army for training; but the villagers have lived there for generations and are the owners of the land. As one woman says, “there is no other land” they could go to.

The documentary was at the same time horrible and beautiful.

Horrible – because the documentary hits us in the face how step by step, gradually but consistently, the Palestinians are driven off their land. Some villagers move to nearby caves. The villagers fight courageously to keep their houses and schools, only to see the bulldozers arriving to destroy the buildings, every time they rebuild them. A peaceful protestor is shot and barely survives, spending the remainder of his life in pain and largely paralyzed in a cave. All this makes it clear that these people just have no rights. They are completely at the mercy of Israeli soldiers, and later on at the mercy of some armed Israeli settlers who have moved into nice new houses nearby. The injustice just splashes off the canvas.

But it was also beautiful – artistically, because of the way the real-life activist footing is combined with fine shots of the deeply human dialogues between the two protagonists – the Palestinian activist and villager Basel and the Israeli journalist Yuval. And beautiful also in a human sense. We are invited to witness how Basel and Yuval develop a friendship against the odds – even though it is clear that the very unequal rights they are enjoying, and hence their vastly unequal civic status, also casts a shadow over their friendship. After all, Yuval can at any point leave the territory, and could also just decide to leave this conflict altogether and do something else with his life – freedoms Basel does not have.

When the movie was finished, one could hear a needle drop in the theater room. Lives are ruined; villages are destroyed; victims of structural injustice have no way to defend them; and the world hardly gives a damn. Does the world sufficiently know, one might ask?

So far, No Other Land won multiple prizes, and is nominated for an Oscar next week. Yet I learnt from the film review in the New York Times that the film could not find a distributor in the USA. Why, oh why? Implicitly the NYT says: Not enough scope for profits; there isn’t enough demand for this type of documentary. This is truly saddening. Because with the US being the most important ally of Israel, the American citizens (and citizens of other countries that are staunch defenders of Israel) have the right to know what is going on in Israel – and not just the horrendous attack by Hamas that ended in the dystopian destruction of Gaza – but also what has been happening much more quietly for many years now in other places in Palestinian Territories. And of course such citizens can read reports by civil society organizations, or journalistic accounts. But the power of this documentary is that it is not a fictious story – it is the raw reality – but at the same time it has a strong narrative and it is much more humane than cold statistics. It would be hard to not develop more sympathy for the Palestinian cause if one sees this move. Is this perhaps part of the explanation for why it hasn’t found a distributor?

Just make sure you see No Other Land when it is in a movie theatre nearby you.