A Palestinian-Israeli collective made one of 2024’s most lauded docs. Will it be released in the US?

JAKE COYLE

Basel Adra, a Palestinian, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli, spent five years making a movie that depicts daily life in Adra’s village under Israeli occupation. The resulting film, “No Other Land,” has been hailed as one of the year’s most powerful documentaries, winning prizes at international film festivals. It’s also stoked controversy, prompted death threats for its makers and — despite the acclaim — remains without an American distributor.

Opening this week in France and next week in the United Kingdom, the feature-length documentary has already sold in many international territories. Its status as an Academy Awards contender remains intact — after hosting it during the New York Film Festival, the Lincoln Center will screen the film for a one-week, Oscar-qualifying run beginning Friday. But the filmmakers believe the monthslong inability to find a U.S. distributor boils down to political reasons, with Election Day in the presidential contest between Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump looming.

“Maybe they’re afraid to be defunded if Trump wins,” says Abraham, speaking in an interview from Paris alongside Adra. “But Basel risked his life for years since he was a young boy to film this material. That requires a lot of courage. Can we not have one distributor with the courage, OK, to take a certain risk, but to distribute such an acclaimed and such an important documentary?”

“No Other Land” began long before the current chapter of the war in Gaza. It’s told largely from the perspective of Adra, who was born in Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in the occupied West Bank. The area, a rugged mountainous region south of Hebron, has for decades been a site of protest against the Israeli government, which ordered Palestinians off the land to make room for a military training ground. In 1980, the Israeli military declared Masafer Yatta a closed “firing zone.” Israeli authorities said the residents — Arab Bedouin who practice a traditional form of agriculture and animal herding and have lived on the land since before 1967 — only used the area part of the year and had no permanent structures there at the time. Adra was born into this; his father was an activist on behalf of the community and Adra was 5 when his mother first took him to a demonstration.

Following a 2022 court decision, the army set up checkpoints and regularly demolished community structures — including a school. A camera, Adra says, “became the only tool beside our steadfastness.” He captured the regular demolitions of homes, the violent encounters with Israeli settlers and the ongoing effect the struggle has had on the villagers. “I started filming when we started to end,” he says in the film, which takes place between 2019 and 2023. It’s a long-term, on-the-ground portrait of the realities of life under Israeli military law. Families are uprooted. Children grow up in poverty. People die. But its makers never envisioned how much worse things could get.

Made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective (the other two directors are Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor), “No Other Land” wrapped shooting last October, just as the Hamas attack occurred and Israel’s war in Gaza began. On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas militants killed over 1,200 people across southern Israel, taking some 250 people hostage. Israel’s retaliatory offensive on the Gaza has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, over half of whom are women and children, say Palestinian health officials who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. In the West Bank, frequent raids into Palestinian cities and towns that Israel says are aimed at Palestinian militants, as well as mounting violence from Jewish settlers, have driven up the death toll since Oct. 7 to more than 760 killed.

“I look at the news just over the past few days. Hundreds of people in Gaza being killed, Israeli hostages dying, massacres happening every day, nonstop,” says Abraham, a Jewish journalist from southern Israel. “And we’re here showing a film in air-conditioned cinemas. There’s a big dissonance in participating in festivals when nothing is festive and everything is becoming worse.”