“Look at this comment,” Basel said, handing his phone over to Yuval. “The post I wrote reached 2,366 people!” Basel’s life-threatening line of work – filming Israeli soldiers and settlers as they laid claim to his home town of Masafer Yatta, on the southern edge of the West Bank – had been taking a toll on him, both physically and mentally. His optimistic, energetic nature seemed to have left him, leaving him uncharacteristically quiet and morose (“I feel the world will end soon”). Only in moments like this, when he realised the impact his videos were making – the people they were reaching – did the light in his eyes return.
The scene described above occurs around the halfway point of No Other Land, a documentary which chronicles the expulsion of Masafer Yatta’s Palestinian inhabitants after a 2022 Israeli Supreme Court order handed control of their ancestral land to the Israel Defense Forces.
Its directors and principal characters, Palestinian filmmaker Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, know better than to fight the invaders head-on.
Instead, they stand by the firing line with cameras ready, hitting record as bulldozers tear into people’s lifelong homes and masked militias threaten to shoot down anybody who impedes or annoys them.
“My body stops, when I see him suffering and I can’t help him,” says a mother whose son was shot in the back, leaving him paralysed. “I tell him, if I could give you anything, give my life, so you would live, I would, but I can’t.”
At the time, the duo celebrated when their videos received a couple of hundred likes or shares. Today, though, their audience numbers into the hundreds of thousands, if not millions.
Reception and awards
After premiering at the 74th Berlin International Film Festival in February 2024, No Other Land has been widely covered by magazines and newspapers around the world and has gone on to win many prestigious accolades, including the Berlinale’s Best Documentary Prize.
Recently, it also secured a nomination for the 2025 Academy Awards – a rare achievement, considering it had yet to find a US distributor.
According to Yuval, this was not an accident. “The film has distribution all over the world,” he told Variety, “and there’s a really big demand for it, so you would expect a big distributor to jump on board. The film is very, very critical of Israeli policies. As an Israeli, I think that’s a really good thing, because we need to be critical of these policies so they can change. But I think the conversation in the US appears to be far less nuanced – there is much less space for this kind of criticism, even when it comes in the form of a film.”
Eric Kohn, a Jewish producer and former film critic, agrees. “No company feels like they can take the risk of the baggage that that film might bring,” he told the Jerusalem Post, “whether or not they agree with the perspective in it.”
In the event that Palestinian films do secure distribution in the US – which, whether under the leadership of Joe Biden or Donald Trump, remains one of Benjamin Netanyahu’s most dependable allies – it’s usually through small, grassroots operations, confining their circulation to the equally small, grassroots world of independent cinema.
When Eric mentions “baggage,” he is undoubtedly referring to the controversy that emerged after the premiere of No Other Land at the Berlinale, where Basel and Yuval’s closing ceremony speech advocating for a two-state solution drew criticism from politicians and media outlets alike.
Kai Wegner, the mayor of Berlin, referred to the speech – and the documentary – as an “intolerable relativisation,” adding that blame for the suffering in Gaza lies with Hamas, not Israel.
Conservative support for the Israeli government soon tipped the scales, causing even the country’s more progressive elements to turn against the documentary and its creators.
Federal Commissioner for culture and media Claudia Roth, who attended the premiere of No Other Land, retracted her initial praise for the film, now describing it as “shockingly one-sided and characterised by deep hatred of Israel,” while Berlin.de, the official website of the German capital, added a since-deleted disclaimer warning viewers of its supposedly “antisemitic tendencies.”
Anything but antisemitic
No Other Land is, of course, anything but antisemitic, directing its criticisms not against the Jewish people in general, but Netanyahu’s regime in particular.
In addition to this, it not only speaks on behalf of Palestinians, but also Jewish people like Yuval, whose calls for peaceful coexistence have earned him death threats in Israel as well as Germany.
Though treated as a traitor to his nation, race, and religion, Yuval does not see a disconnect between his actions and his origin: as a descendant of Holocaust survivors, he stands against discrimination and violence – regardless of where it occurs, or who carries it out.
“In two days,” he said at the Berlinale, “we will go back to a land where we are not equal. I am living under civilian law, and Basel is under military law. We live 30 minutes from one another, but I have voting rights, and Basel does not. I am free to move where I want in this land. Basel is, like millions of Palestinians, locked in the occupied West Bank. This situation of apartheid between us, this inequality, it has to end.”
‘More than a film’
While some members of the general public take issue with No Other Land’s focus on the Palestinian side of the story – a claim which in and of itself discredits the validity of Yuval’s own, Jewish viewpoint – film critics around the world applaud its cinematic force, including those from the US.
Sheila O’Malley, writing for RogerEbert.com, called the documentary an “act of bearing witness to the ‘shadows no one’s attending to,'” while Ahmed Moor of The Nation wrote that “melancholy and outrage kept me from sitting still and focusing on the screen.”
Additionally, David Ehrlich, the Jewish lead critic of the magazine Indiewire, named No Other Land the second-best film of 2024, and fellow critic J. Hoberman, also Jewish, told the Jerusalem Post that he thought it was “more than a film.”
All that matters is ending the occupation
When the Jerusalem Post reached out to Basel and Yuval for comment about their unexpected but well-deserved Oscar nomination, their representatives replied saying they had none, as “things have been quite intense in the West Bank.”
This comment, which does not even come from the filmmakers themselves, perfectly encapsulates what No Other Land is about.
Although Basel dreamt of becoming a filmmaker ever since his father gave him his first camera, and although his first feature film is well-shot and thoroughly moving, No Other Land is not a work of art.
Its creators didn’t set out to make a cinematic masterpiece, and clearly don’t want the documentary to be treated as such – even if, according to many definitions, it is.
Film festival awards and Oscar nominations are obviously welcomed, but only insofar as they raise awareness for what is happening in the West Bank.
Basel and Yuval’s desire for recognition – as filmmakers or as journalists – is, if they have such a desire at all, completely secondary.
The thing that matters most – the only thing that matters – is ending the Israeli occupation.
Tim Brinkhof is a journalist originally from the Netherlands, now based in New York. He specializes in art, history, and literature. He studied early Netherlandish painting and Slavic literature at NYU and has contributed to publications such as Esquire, Film & History, and New Lines Magazine
Follow him on X: @tmabrnk
