NEW YORK (AP) — Basel Adra, a Palestinian, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli, spent five years making a film depicting daily life in Adra’s village under Israeli occupation. The resulting film, “No Other Land,” was hailed as one of the most powerful documentaries of the year and won awards at international film festivals.
It has also stoked controversy, sparked death threats against its makers and, despite acclaim, remains without an American distributor.
The feature-length documentary opens in France this week and the UK next week and has already been sold to many international territories. Its status as an Oscar contender remains — after screening during the New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center will screen the film for a weeklong, Oscar-qualifying screening starting Friday. But filmmakers believe the months-long inability to find a U.S. distributor is due to political reasons as Election Day approaches in the presidential contest between Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump.
“Maybe they are afraid that if Trump wins, their resources will be withdrawn,” Abraham said in an interview from Paris alongside Adra. “But Basel has been risking his life to film this material for years, since he was a little boy. That takes a lot of courage. Can’t we have a distributor who has the courage to take some risks but distribute such an acclaimed and important documentary?”
“No Other Land” began long before the current chapter of the Gaza War. It is 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 been the scene of decades of protest against the Israeli government, which ordered Palestinians to leave the country to make way for a military training ground.
In 1980, the Israeli military declared Masafer Yatta a closed “firing zone.” Israeli authorities said the residents – Arab Bedouins who practice a conventional form of agriculture and livestock raising and have lived on the land since before 1967 – only used part of the year and there were no lasting structures there at the time.
Adra was born here; His father was an activist on behalf of the community and Adra was five years elderly when his mother took him to a demonstration for the first time.
Following a 2022 court ruling, the army set up checkpoints and regularly destroyed community structures – including a school. A camera, says Adra, “became the only tool besides our fortitude.” He captured the regular destruction of homes, the violent clashes with Israeli settlers and the lasting impact of the fighting on the villagers.
“I started filming when we were finishing,” he says in the film, which takes place between 2019 and 2023.
It is a long-term, practical portrait of the realities of life under Israeli military law. Families are being uprooted. Children grow up in poverty. People die. But its creators never imagined how much worse it could get.
No Other Land was made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective (the other two directors are Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor) and finished filming last October, right around the time of the Hamas attack and Israel’s war in Gaza began.
On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants killed over 1,200 people in southern Israel and took about 250 people hostage. Israel’s retaliatory offensive in Gaza has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, more than half of whom are women and children, say Palestinian health officials, who make no distinction between civilians and combatants. In the West Bank, regular raids on Palestinian cities and towns that Israel says target Palestinian militants, as well as increasing violence by Jewish settlers, have pushed the death toll to over 760 since October 7.
“I look at the news from the last few days. Hundreds of people in Gaza are being killed, Israeli hostages are dying, massacres are happening nonstop every day,” says Abraham, a Jewish journalist from southern Israel. “And we are showing a film here in air-conditioned cinemas. There is a great dissonance in attending festivals when nothing is festive and everything is getting worse.”
The war in Gaza — and now the war in Lebanon and the specter of war with Iran — have inevitably changed the landscape for “No Other Land,” a film that combines documentary and activism to put a human face on Palestinian suffering . It won awards in Berlin, Switzerland, Vancouver and South Korea. But for Adra that hardly matters.
“We made this film not to lose Masafer Yatta, not to lose our houses,” says Adra. “It’s a great success for the film, but when I go back to reality everything gets worse. So there’s this conflict in my head. The film is a success and is made public, people want to see it, but it does not contribute to what is happening on the ground. It doesn’t change anything.”
“No Other Land” caused controversy shortly after its debut at the Berlin Film Festival in February. In accepting the documentary award, Adra spoke of the difficulty of doing so “when tens of thousands of my people are 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 are extremely sensitive, many politicians criticized the filmmakers for not mentioning Israeli victims or Hamas. Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture minister, said the speeches were “shockingly one-sided.” Kai Wegner, Governing Mayor of Berlin, called it an “unbearable relativization”. Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, called it “blatant anti-Semitic discourse.”
Abraham, who says he has received death threats, was “furious” at the response. As a descendant of Holocaust victims, he believes that labeling criticism of Israeli policy as anti-Semitic deprives the term of its meaning.
“We demanded equal rights between Palestinians and Israelis. We demanded an end to the occupation. We talked about what we believe are the political roots of violence in our country. For me that is the most important message there can be,” says Abraham. “It feels like we’re living in the novel ‘1984’, where you make statements like that and they’re somehow labeled as controversial.”
The relationship between Adra and Abraham, which they hope can represent Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, is a central part of “No Other Land.”
Together they rush to document the arrival of tanks or military bulldozers; They complain about the lack of attention their social media posts or articles receive online; They think about their future.
But there are also tensions in their differences. One lives under civil law, the other under military law. Whether Adra can pass through checkpoints to travel abroad is always questionable. The film stars her Palestinian co-director Ballal, who skeptically questions Abraham’s place in the fight.
“It could be your brother or friend who destroyed my house,” Ballal says.
“As an Israeli, I believe that the status quo is harmful to Israelis because security in the country is reciprocal,” Abraham told The Associated Press. “People depend on each other. We cannot expect security if Palestinians do not have freedom.”
Even before the war in Gaza, Adra and Abraham were struggling to gain international attention for Masafer Yatta.
Now their cause is dwarfed by the destruction in Gaza, and they find it complex to find hope. Days after October 7, Adra’s cousin was shot at close range by a settler, an incident captured on film. “For me,” says Adra, “it’s not clear where this is going.”
According to the filmmakers, there was great interest in the discussions with the distributors. “They say they love the movie, but then they hesitate,” Abraham says.
Whether U.S. film distributors have become too politically cautious was also a prominent question for the Trump drama “The Apprentice,” which only found a home at Briarcliff Entertainment shortly before its release last month. “Union,” a well-received documentary about labor organizing at Amazon, recently moved to self-distribute its release.
“Once upon a time, American film distributors and exhibitors embraced controversy—especially when it came to acclaimed films whose controversy was inextricably linked to their humanity,” wrote New York magazine critic Bilge Ebiri on “No Other Country”. “Are these companies holding back because of budgetary reasons, because of cowardice, because of political differences?”
“We will not allow the conversation to even begin by silencing our voices, the voices of a Palestinian who opposes the occupation and the voice of an Israeli who also opposes the occupation and believes in a future of equality and Justice for all,” says Abraham. “Why are these types of voices preventing you from entering the mainstream cinema space in the US?” (The film also lacks an Israeli distributor.)
However it is viewed, the filmmakers hope “No Other Land” remains an crucial document on the current crisis.
“We wanted to send the message that the status quo is very harmful and should change,” says Adra. “A political solution is needed. That was before October 7th. We don’t want to come to a day like October 7th. We want to warn world leaders to take action and stop participating in the occupation.”
“What is happening is very, very sad and tragic,” he added. “I could never have imagined in my life that something like this could happen and that the world would allow it.”
