A Palestinian Point of View Anchors Oscar-Nominated ‘No Other Land’

I am chagrined to admit that I was under the influence in early December — not of seasonal libations but of 40-plus years of doggedly hopeful documentaries about the Israeli-Palestinian situation — when I watched No Other Land in preparation for the San Francisco Bay Area Film Critics Circle’s year-end awards vote.

A four-year collaboration between Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham — the twentysomething onscreen protagonists — and Palestinian Hamdan Ballal and Israeli Rachel Szor, No Other Land is an infuriating verité record of the Israel military’s incessant intimidation and persecution of the residents of the 20-odd Palestinian villages in the hilly Masafer Yatta area of the West Bank.

The film screened at 50 festivals around the world in 2024 (including SFFILM’s Doc Stories) after its prize-winning premiere at Berlin, and was acquired for distribution in two dozen countries (though not the U.S.). Nominated for the Academy Award for Documentary Feature following a qualifying New York theatrical booking, No Other Land opens Feb. 14 at the Roxie.

The filmmakers completed their work before Hamas killed around 1,200 Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023 and Israel subsequently killed over 46,000 Palestinians in Gaza (according to Reuters). Inevitably, every viewing of No Other Land is colored by that carnage, as well as by the current lunacy emanating from the White House about “relocating” the Palestinians from their land and homes in Gaza (which UN Secretary-General António Guterres warns is a form of “ethnic cleansing”).

No Other Land employs a tight focus, restricting itself to the events happening in the immediate vicinity of resident Basel Adra and his small cache of smartphones and digital video cameras. The effect is to refract Israel’s overarching political agenda of pushing out the Palestinians (via the “official” actions of soldiers and the “unsanctioned” violence of settlers) through the eyes of the families on the ground.

Adra’s father was also an activist — he devotes his energies now to operating a gas station, but still has the chops and savvy to intervene when necessary, and get arrested, to protect his son — and the lack of opportunities available to them is a form of injustice. We learn in passing that Adra only was able to get construction jobs when he was a student in Beersheba, which is hardly the professional experience a college kid covets.

No Other Land doesn’t have much of a narrative arc, by which I mean that a plot doesn’t develop so much as events repeat, and repeat, and repeat: The army demolishes homes on the basis that the residents don’t have permits, the homeowners scream at the soldiers that the Israeli government won’t give them legal permission to build on their own land, the army leaves and the people rebuild (often under cover of darkness).

There isn’t much character development either. The change in Adra from the summer of 2019 to 2023 is ever-escalating exhaustion, expressed as silence and frustration. While it doesn’t make for entertaining cinema (which is a perquisite for most viewers, even of documentaries), these sequences powerfully convey the ground-down effects of a war of attrition.

Yuval Abraham enters the film in its early stages as a sympathetic journalist for an Israeli online outlet whose reach, we gather, is pretty small. He does get some face time on an Israeli current events program, but his ability to push back on the government’s narrative is quite limited. (Possibly due to Abraham’s posts, Adra is booked on a flurry of international TV programs, including Democracy Now. But a news cycle doesn’t last forever, and Adra returns to his usual chaotic routine.)

I consider Abraham as a Gen Z descendant of the Israeli journalists, activists and sympathizers whom Palestinians welcomed to the West Bank in documentaries of yore. Today, though, everyone — including the youthful filmmakers of No Other Land — knows those idealistic, well-meaning allies didn’t make much of a dent. And all those films, produced for European and American television with the unspoken yet explicit goal of raising public and governmental pressure on the Israeli government, had little effect on the occupation.

So it’s essential that No Other Land deals head-on with Abraham’s presence. “What do you think about what your country is doing to us?” one of Adra’s neighbors pointedly asks, after we’ve seen soldiers bulldozing homes and a sheep pen. “I think it’s a crime,” Abraham answers.

Of course, Abraham can leave any time he wants, and drive home unimpeded through any checkpoint. While his influence is limited, so is his risk. He is clear that he has taken a position as an Israeli citizen and backed it with action, but he is a minor character in the Palestinian-Israeli saga.

And a supporting player in No Other Land. When I viewed the film back in December, I was comforted by this heat-of-battle friendship between two smart, likable young men making extraordinary sacrifices for a just cause. I grabbed for the wispiest bit of evidence that coexistence could still exist even after the irrevocably apocalyptic 15 months that began on Oct. 7.

When I revisited No Other Land again last week, I exorcised any Hallmark Channel vibe in the first minute and a half. My Pollyanna hookah dream of coexistence vanished like smoke. The connection between Adra and Abraham, conjured though the magic of editing, may not have been invented out of whole cloth, but it wasn’t a central theme, either.

I had to confront the shocking reality. No Other Land isn’t a documentary about power sharing, or power shifts, or the power of grassroots resistance or grassroots journalism. It isn’t a film about the power of the righteous, or the promise of a brighter future, or even the persistence of the human spirit (though that is at the core of the Palestinian experience).

No Other Land is a stark and brutal document of power and powerlessness. Even, or especially, in the current moment, it is a necessary shock to our system.

‘No Other Land’ plays Feb. 14–27, 2025 at the Roxie Theater.