The award-winning documentary film No Other Land, focusing on Palestinians living in the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank, finally made its Jerusalem debut this month – a full year after its February 2024 world premiere at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival.
Cinema Spiegel, part of Jerusalem’s Sam Spiegel Film and Television School, hosted a screening of the documentary on February 20, followed by a conversation with director and filmmaker Yuval Abraham.
The film has already won numerous awards worldwide, including the Berlinale Documentary Film Award, and it was nominated for Best Documentary Feature Film at this year’s Oscars, which took place on Sunday night.
The filmmakers independently released No Other Land in a number of cities across the US, including a one-week run at New York’s Film at Lincoln Center that qualified the film for an Oscar nomination.
Codirected by an Israeli-Palestinian filmmaking collective that includes Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, the film was shot over the course of four years, between 2019 and October 2023, and also incorporates archival footage filmed by Adra’s family and community, as well as news segments reporting on Masafer Yatta.
Perspective of the Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta
The film is mostly in Arabic, with Hebrew subtitles, and focuses on the perspective of the Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta.
It opens with Adra, a young Palestinian activist, narrating events from his childhood in Masafer Yatta, beginning with his father’s arrest for political activism and followed two years later by the first protest he joined with his mother, at the age of seven. Bringing the viewer into this world through a combination of personal footage and news clips, Adra depicts life in Masafer Yatta as it fights for survival.
MASAFER YATTA, which comprises a number of Palestinian villages in the South Hebron Hills in the West Bank, was declared a closed military zone by the Israeli army in the 1980s to allow – according to recently revealed government documents from the time, including the transcript of a meeting between Ariel Sharon and army representatives – for the expulsion of its Palestinian residents.
Twelve villages received eviction orders in 1999, and hundreds of residents were forcibly evicted that same year. Israeli lawyers and human rights organizations representing the residents appealed to the High Court of Justice, leading to two decades of litigation that ultimately failed to protect the community and culminated in a 2022 Supreme Court ruling that opened the door to more evictions.
The Court, including its President Isaac Amit, ruled that there were no permanent dwellings in Masafer Yatta before the year 2000, just shepherds.
No Other Land presents archival footage from these years, as Adra narrates how he observed his father’s activism throughout his childhood. As the documentary unfolds and we watch Adra’s own development as an activist, filming daily life and ongoing demolitions in an attempt to bring attention to the plight of Masafer Yatta’s residents, it is clear he is following in his father’s footsteps.
Adra, whose camera is his primary tool of resistance, seeks to raise awareness of Masafer Yatta’s destruction in the hope that international pressure might save the community.
The film follows a relatively chronological format, starting with the summer of 2019 and the expulsion of Palestinian families in the village. As people desperately carry belongings out of their homes, a bulldozer arrives and begins demolishing the homes as families watch. After the noise of the destruction, a deafening quiet settles.
In the aftermath of this event, Jewish Israeli journalist and activist Yuval Abraham comes to document what is happening in Masafer Yatta and meets with Adra, who introduces him to the community. The trauma is still fresh and raw when Abraham, who speaks Arabic fluently, begins interviewing the families.
Traveling back and forth between his home in Jerusalem and Masafer Yatta, Abraham spends an increasing amount of time there and continues recording the results of subsequent rounds of demolitions alongside Adra, even joining in the efforts to help families rebuild their homes under the cover of night.
It is in the tense moments following yet another demolition that the inspiration for the documentary’s title is born. A reporter asks a woman whose house had just been destroyed if she has someplace else to go. “We have no other land,” she replies simply, in a poignant parallel to the well-known Hebrew line.
Continued involvement in Masafer Yatta’s community
IN THE conversation following the documentary’s screening at Cinema Spiegel, Abraham noted that while journalists generally arrive after something occurs to observe the results and gather interviews, his continued involvement in Masafer Yatta’s community and his presence on location meant that he was capturing everything in real time.
Abraham also addressed the film’s limited perspective, explaining that he focused on the emotionally compelling human element of the story, rather than going into the intricacies of the legal context surrounding Masafer Yatta or being overly didactic. Additionally, the footage is limited to Masafer Yatta, mirroring the limitations of Adra’s own camera, and the narrative follows his experience, rather than attempting to report on all the events in the area.
For this reason, the film does not address other confrontations between Israelis and Palestinians, whether in the West Bank or in Israel, and omits any mention of terrorist attacks perpetrated by Palestinians on Jewish residents in the West Bank or the experiences of Palestinians in other parts of the West Bank.
And though the documentary’s conclusion notes that filming ended in October 2023, with a radio broadcast reporting in Arabic that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has vowed to avenge the October 7 massacre and that Israel was conducting airstrikes on the Gaza Strip as Israeli hostages were being held in tunnels, the film does not otherwise address the Israel-Hamas War.
INTERTWINED WITH the documentation of Masafer Yatta’s struggle for survival is the story of the friendship between Adra and Abraham, as they work together to expose what is happening in an effort to rally international pressure, both against the army’s displacement of Palestinian families and the increasingly frequent attacks on the village by armed settlers.
Some of the film’s most touching scenes are the quiet moments at night, with Adra and Abraham sitting in the dark while everyone else is asleep, smoking as they share what they want in life and brainstorm how to effectively create change.
In the fusion of despair over the present and yearning for a better future, there is a spark of hope born of this partnership between an Israeli and a Palestinian that turns into a deep friendship. When one of them is discouraged by the lack of progress, the other strives to uplift him, and this mutual support runs a consistent thread through the film.
“You need to be patient,” Adra tells a distressed Abraham as they are driving together, and he jokes about Abraham wanting to solve everything in 10 days and go home.
“It’ll be so good here one day,” Abraham remarks during one of their nighttime chats toward the end of the film, “and then you can visit me – not me always visiting you.”
Though this moment of optimism forms a stark contrast to the reality in which the two of them are working, as they risk their very lives in the filming process, it also allows both of them (and the viewer) to catch a glimpse of a better future, even as the documentary closes on a tragic note.
No Other Land is available to stream for free for residents of Israel and the Palestinian territories: nootherland.mekomit.co.il
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