From the summer of 2019 to the winter of 2023, Basel Adra — along with co-directors Yuval Abraham and Handan Ballal — documented how his village in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank was being systematically cleared by the Israeli government to make way for a military training ground. There is a morbid irony to Israel’s legalistic logic, in that it is not as if the Israeli military has to build anything there to train, as their purpose is in large part the displacement of peoples. Largely over the course of Israel’s history, and most horrifically in the last year, that displacement has been the ethnic cleansing Palestinians and their genocide in Gaza at the hands of the IDF. While the total annihilation of Palestine was not in the world’s eye in 2019, those who had their homes ripped down by bulldozers and who were shot with American-made rifles tried desperately to get people to pay attention. As Adra says in the opening, “I started filming when we started to end.”
No Other Land is an activist film through and through, both necessarily in its content — trying to document the destruction of one’s home — but also in trying to prevent it through media. It’s a terrible part of reality, but it has an effect. In the middle of the film is an archival clip of Tony Blair walking around the village for seven minutes, which stopped the bulldozers for a short while. When the villagers go to protest their forced relocation multiple times a week, it too results in pauses to the incursions by Israel. Even when people get arrested or brutalized by the police, it keeps everyone else on the land for just a little longer. Yet as the film progresses, the film always feels more dire — not because of some futility (although audiences will necessarily sense some inevitability as they know that Al-Aqsa Flood and Israel’s genocidal response are right around the corner) — but because the violence constantly escalates. Not just the police and military, but armed settlers start to appear, even shooting locals with impunity. By the end, a mob of masked settlers descends Masafer Yatta, with even Adra getting hit by a thrown rock while filming. This is one of the last straws for many in the village, and so many at the end leave to never return, another modern Nabka unfolding faster and faster right before the viewer’s eyes.
These images, of course, already flood the media sphere, but No Other Land goes further than just presenting the issue at hand, instead trying to investigate the humanitarian conundrum of outsiders trying to journalistically document it. The co-director, Yuval Abraham, is Israeli, and although he is obviously sympathetic to the cause of a liberated Palestine, Adra makes a difficult point in one of their conservations, telling him, “You come here from the outside, you can leave, you have a job.” To Adra, there is no separation between being an activist filmmaker and living — to be an activist filmmaker is to try to save his and his family’s way of life. Abraham, no matter how sympathetic, still has all the freedoms of the oppressor. That is not to knock Abraham, or any other filmmaker/journalist/activist that gets involved with a cause that is not their own, but it is an essential matter to keep in mind. And while Adra may have stopped filming in 2023, the awful history in progress marches on: on the day of No Other Land’s screening at NYFF, Adra’s activist father was arbitrarily abducted by soldiers.
Published as part of NYFF 2024 — Dispatch 3.
