Leah Asmelash, CNN
Sun, November 3, 2024 at 1:00 AM MDT
Midway through the documentary “No Other Land,” journalist and activist Basel Adra recounts a 2009 visit to his village by former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair.
In a navy suit and crisp tie, surrounded by security detail and photographers, Blair walked through the village for seven minutes, Adra says in a voice-over.
He visits the local school, Adra says. He passes by Adra’s family’s home. He nods along to something someone says off camera, the footage shows. He shakes a hand. He smiles.
Months later, after Blair returns to the UK, Israel cancels the demolition orders held for the school and home in the street he visited, Adra says. In the mere handful of minutes, Blair accomplished what villagers had been trying to do for years.
“This,” Adra says, “is a story about power.”
“No Other Land” tells of the continued demolition of Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in the Hebron mountains of the West Bank where Adra and his family still live. But as we see the demolition — the local playground torn down, his family moving their beds and other belongings into a cave, his brother shot and killed by soldiers, attacks by Jewish settlers — Adra and the rest of the filmmakers also show us a community trying to survive.
Adra’s filming begins in 2019 and stretches until 2023, chronicling the Israeli government’s attempt to evict the villagers by force, having claimed the land for a military training facility and firing range in 1981. (During the lengthy legal battle, before the Israeli supreme court ruled in favor of demolishing homes in the villages in 2022, Israeli prosecutors argued that Palestinian residents only began squatting in the area when it was declared a firing range, after previously using the land as seasonal pasture. Residents countered, saying the IDF had blown up Palestinian homes in Masafer Yatta decades earlier, in 1966).
The documentary has already won awards at the Berlin International Film Festival, and began a one-week run at Lincoln Center in New York this weekend. Still, Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, two of the filmmakers behind the documentary, told CNN that American distributors have been hesitant to pick up “No Other Land,” despite widespread acclaim from critics.
Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham in "No Other Land." - Antipode Films
While the documentary finishes before the events of last year’s Hamas attack, which took the lives of roughly 1,200 people in Israel, its release comes at a time when war in the Middle East is accelerating, as Israel’s offensive in Gaza have left at least 42,500 people dead since October 8, 2023. While promoting the film at the New York Film Festival in October, Abraham and Adra unexpectedly cut their US tour short to be with their families as the violence escalated. Even as the movie succeeds, they told CNN, little on the ground back home has improved.
Speaking from Adra’s family home in Masafer Yatta, they spoke with CNN about life under occupation, and what, if anything, their documentary might change.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What motivated you to pick up the camera in the first place? Was making a documentary always the goal?
Basel Adra: No, it wasn’t. It was documenting. To document the things around me was the goal, and it always felt important to catch the incidents that’s happening around us as evidence of the reality of what’s happening. And then, after years, the guys joined, and we decided together that we want to make a movie.
Yuval Abraham: I came here as a journalist, so documenting was part of the job. It’s something that I believe in. I came into journalism out of realizing that there is so much that is not being told in the land that we live in that needs to be told. But for me, the act of documenting, whether it’s by writing or by filming, always has a purpose or an audience in mind, most of the time. Whereas for Basel, it’s also that, but as he said, it’s also the way to survive when you’re being attacked, or when your community is.
You started filming this in 2019 and you wrapped it up before the events of October last year. Do you think the film has changed or taken on new meaning because of what’s happened since then?
Abraham: Of course, the movie meets the audience at the moment where the audience is. Now, Palestine and Israel are on the news 24/7 for the past year. To me, the film is showing the reality on the ground before October, and it’s showing essentially the decades-long occupation of Palestinians. And I think one of the reasons why we made the movie is, for me, is because — October 7 is an atrocity — but the world was not paying attention, almost at all, to the violent life that Palestinians are living under for decades before October
A child is seen playing in Masafer Yatta. - Antipode Films
This adds so much urgency for me to the film right now. It’s clear that, to anybody who watches our film and looks at the reality of the farmers in Masafer Yatta, living under Israeli military control is not something sustainable and it’s not something just. It’s not something that can continue. Me and Basel were born in the ‘90s. If we would have reached a political solution then, imagine how many more people would be alive today? And it’s unfortunate that people are now talking about the need for political change only after, in a way, human beings are paying with their blood.
I know with the recent escalation, you had to cut your time in the US short. How did it feel to go from touring this documentary all over the world, getting awards, etc., to zooming back home to Palestine and Israel?
Adra: It’s different. It’s not easy to go to the festivals and succeed, and journalists talk about it, the audience wants to see it, and it’s been sold out in many festivals. But coming back to the reality here, it’s sad to see that the situation is going, changing to be worse than it was even before.
Abraham: It’s a question that we always ask ourselves: What can we do to cause change? To end the occupation, to reach a political movement? Now, I think after really a year, it’s hard not to talk about Gaza, honestly, because you see every single day, literally, houses filled with families being bombed and little children obliterated or burnt alive. And now in the north of the Gaza Strip, there is an ethnic cleansing. It’s one of the biggest atrocities of our age and time, and the atrocities of October 7 cannot justify what has been going on every single day since.
What kind of footage do people need to see for the United States to change its foreign policy in a way which would be constructive for the people who are living here, in a way which will push us towards some kind of political solution?
Those of us who want to see a future where this oppression ends have to call for a change. And so can our film do that? I don’t think it can do that. It’s very hard to speak about the power now of documentary and footage, when there is so much footage. You can now Google. I mean, just open Twitter and open Facebook, you see so much endless footage of violence and nothing is changing. It’s a complicated position that we are in, so I don’t know what can change.
So, you don’t necessarily feel hope that things can change, because there’s footage everywhere?
Abraham: This is why we made a documentary, because there is a difference between just posting a random instance of violence to watching our film, which tells a very strong human story of a community for four years, trying to survive on their land. We hope that watching a film will have some kind of impact that these videos that we post on social media does not have.
At the end of the day, we’re not powerful people, and if the people who have power are not using their power to change the reality, then things are not going to change. We can make a million documentaries about it, but they’re not going to change their reality.
When was the moment where you decided, ‘I’m done waiting on other journalists; I’m going to tell my own story?’
Adra: Well, this is like back in the beginning, of documenting what’s going on. What I saw, like the missions happening, the attacks are happening here in Masafer Yatta. But it’s not a story, even, it’s a routine in our lives. So there I started using social media, writing articles and filming what is happening.
Abraham: There are times in history when policy becomes invisible to the people because it happens so much. It’s just routine. It’s part of the routine oppression. I think of South Africa, for example. There were times when it was just considered normal, under the apartheid regime, to have certain people who cannot vote for the main government. It was just normal. You didn’t need to report about it. And this is what’s really happening here in Masafer Yatta. Yesterday, houses were demolished. Was it reported anywhere? It’s not going to be reported, because this is the day-to-day life, the routine life, under the military occupation.
Scenes from "No Other Land." - Antipode Films
One of the challenges we face as journalists or even as activists, is how to take a policy that is a routine, that the people are not able to see, and to make them see it. And this is one reason to make the film, to make this policy a story that will be so strong that will show the human aspects of it in such a powerful way that people will be interested to see it.
I’ve heard some places have been hesitant to maybe distribute the documentary theatrically. Is that something that you have run into?
Adra: Yeah, we still don’t have a distributor in the US, we think it’s because of the subject, they’re not taking it. We wish this will change in the future, because we really want the movie to be shown around the US, and we want millions of people to see it.
What are you hoping the impact will be?
Adra: We want political change for the situation here.
Abraham: Change is possible, especially if there is willingness from the US leaders to allow us to reach the point of change. The United States is very much complicit in what we are seeing in our movie. For a better future for Palestinians and for Israelis, we need change in US foreign policy, and we hope that the film will contribute to that.
Like that moment with Blair, for example.
Abraham: It just gives you an example of people’s lives here are getting ruined, and for people in power who are sitting in Washington, DC or in New York or in London, to change that is a matter of lifting their finger to exert pressure on Israel to stop.
Of course, in the long term, we hope that the film — and not only our film, activism and work that we are doing on the ground and abroad — will lead to an end to this occupation, and to a political solution that is based on Palestinians having freedom, and Palestinians and Israelis both having political and individual rights. And the way to do that is the US changing their foreign policy. That is one of the main things that need to change, and if our film can contribute to that, even just a little bit, then I’m very, very happy that we made it.
A Palestinian-Israeli collective made one of 2024's most lauded docs. Will it be released in the US?
JAKE COYLE
Updated Sat, November 2, 2024
FILE - Palestinian Basel Adra, right, and Israeli Yuval Abraham receive the documentary award for "No Other Land" at the International Film Festival, Berlinale, in Berlin, Saturday, Feb. 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)ASSOCIATED PRESS
This image released by Antipode Films shows a scene from "No Other Land". (Antipode Films via AP)ASSOCIATED PRESS
Palestinians mourn their relatives killed in the Israeli bombardment of the Gaza Strip at a hospital morgue in Deir al-Balah, Tuesday, Oct. 29, 2024. (AP Photo/Abdel Kareem Hana)ASSOCIATED PRESS
Police disperse people protesting against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's government and calling for the release of hostages held in the Gaza Strip by the Hamas militant group, near the Prime Minister's residence in Jerusalem, Monday, Oct. 28, 2024. (AP Photo/Ohad Zwigenberg)ASSOCIATED PRESS
FILE - Palestinians walk through the destruction left by the Israeli air and ground offensive on the Gaza Strip near Shifa Hospital in Gaza City, on April 1, 2024. (AP Photo/Mohammed Hajjar, File)ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK (AP) — 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.”
The war in Gaza — and now the war in Lebanon and the specter of one with Iran — has inevitably altered the landscape for “No Other Land,” a film that marries documentary filmmaking and activism to put a human face to Palestinian suffering. It's won awards in Berlin, Switzerland, Vancouver and South Korea. But for Adra, little of that matters.
“We made this movie to not lose Masafer Yatta, to not lose our homes,” says Adra. “It’s very successful for the movie, but when I go back to the reality, it’s changing for the worse. So there’s this conflict on my mind. The movie is succeeding and has publicity, people want to watch it, but it’s not helping what’s happening on the ground. It doesn’t change anything.”
“No Other Land” was enmeshed in controversy soon after its February debut at the Berlin Film Festival. While accepting the documentary award, Adra spoke about the difficulty of doing so “when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza.” Abraham called for an end to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.
In Germany, where anti-Israel statements have acute sensitivity, numerous politicians criticized the filmmakers for making no mention of Israeli victims or Hamas. Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture minister, said the speeches were “shockingly one-sided.” Kai Wegner, mayor of Berlin, called them “intolerable relativization.” Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, called it “blatant antisemitic discourse.”
Abraham, who says he received death threats, was “enraged” by the response. As a descendent of Holocaust victims, he believes labeling criticism of Israeli policies as antisemitic empties the phrase of meaning.
“We called for equality between Palestinians and Israelis. We called for an end to the occupation. We spoke about what we see as the political roots of the violence that exists in our land. To me, this the most important message that there can be,” says Abraham. “It feels like we’re living in the ‘1984’ novel where you make these kinds of statements and that’s somehow labeled as controversial.”
Adra and Abraham's relationship, one they hope can stand for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, is a central component of “No Other Land.”
Together, they rush to document the arrival of tanks or military bulldozers; they lament the little attention their social media posts or articles find online; they ponder their futures.
But there is also tension in their differences. One lives under civilian law, the other under military law. Whether Adra will be able to pass through checkpoints to travel abroad is always in question. In the film, their Palestinian co-director, Ballal, is seen skeptically questioning Abraham’s place in the struggle.
“It could be your brother or friend who destroyed my home,” Ballal tells him.
“As an Israeli, I believe that the status quo is harmful for Israelis for the simple fact that security in the land is mutual,” Abraham tells The Associated Press. “People are dependent on one another. We cannot expect to have security if Palestinians don’t have freedom.”
Even before the war in Gaza, Adra and Abraham struggled to gain international attention for Masafer Yatta.
Now, their cause is dwarfed by the destruction in Gaza, and it’s difficult for them to feel any hope. Days after Oct. 7, Adra’s cousin was shot and killed point blank by a settler, an incident captured in the film. “For me,” says Adra, “there’s nothing clear where this is going.”
In meetings with distributors, the filmmakers say, there's been a lot of interest. “They say they love the film, but then they're hesitant,” says Abraham.
Whether U.S. film distributors have grown too cautious politically was also a prominent question for the Trump drama “The Apprentice,” which only found a home with Briarcliff Entertainment shortly before it was released last month. “Union,” a well-received documentary about labor organization at Amazon, recently resorted to self-distributing its release.
“Once upon a time, American film distributors and exhibitors embraced controversy — especially when it came to acclaimed movies whose controversy was inextricably intertwined with their humanity,” the New York magazine critic Bilge Ebiri wrote of “No Other Land.” “Are these companies holding back out of budgetary reasons, out of cowardice, out of political disagreement?”
“It’s not allowing the conversation even to begin by silencing our voices, the voices of a Palestinian who is resisting the occupation and the voice of an Israeli who is also against occupation and believes in a future of equality and justice for everyone,” Abraham says. “Why are you blocking these kinds of voices from entering the space of mainstream cinema in the U.S.?” (The film also lacks an Israeli distributor.)
However it gets seen, the filmmakers hope “No Other Land” remains a vital document to the current crisis.
“We wanted to send the message that the status quo is very harmful and it should change,” says Adra. “A political solution is needed. That was before Oct. 7. We don’t want to get to a day such as Oct. 7. We want to warn global leaders to take actions and stop being complicit with the occupation.”
