The world indeed listened. Upon its controversial premiere at Berlinale 2024, No Other Land garnered two major awards, the Panorama Audience Award and the Berlinale Documentary Film Award. The immediate wrangle followed: the filmmakers were accused of anti-Semitism, including Abraham, whose ancestors perished in the concentration camps in World War II. German culture minister Claudia Roth, who was in attendance, added oil to the fire when she clarified that her applause had been reserved only for Yuval, not Basel. The irony of this debacle with Roth could not have better illustrated the precarity and the invisibility of Palestinian voices. The act of censorship defines the war in Gaza and the occupation of the West Bank. The major players in this political game are either silent or flog themselves through self-censorship.
No Other Land is a testament to speaking out against injustice in a world that consists of doom-scrollling, online fatigue, and instant sharing. The film begins in the summer of 2019. Adra lives in Masafer Yatta and fights against the Israeli military. Equipped with bulldozers, the army, under the command of a man named Ilan, methodically demolishes the villagers’ houses. The villagers are pushed aside, beaten up or arrested, as well as incurring injuries or being shot to death.
Basel, who studied law but is unable to practice it, documents the destruction and shares it online. Yuval, who lives in Be’er Sheva, just 30 minutes from Basel’s village, assists him. “A human rights Israeli,” the villagers jokingly say of Yuval. Masafer Yatta, a small settlement in the mountains, becomes the epicentre of a legal and spiritual battleground. The first expulsion orders came in 1981 when Nasser, Basel’s father, was his age. Numerous arrests, threats, and beatings have not deterred him from speaking out. In the years of the illegal occupation, the villagers of Masafer Yatta had amassed a lot of footage, which the filmmakers deftly incorporate into the film. We see Basel as a kid running around the village and his father trying to stop the seizure of the Palestinian land. It is largely due to this personal element that No Other Land transcends its necessary urgency as ‘a report-from-the-front’ documentary and becomes an intergenerational story of commitment and survival.
In 2022, the villagers lost the legal fight against the Israeli state when the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the expulsion of the Palestinians was legal. Since then, the audacity of the army, along with Israeli settlers has only increased. Basel’s despair becomes palpable. Yuval, after a hard day of witnessing and reporting on the individual and collective tragedies of Masafer Yatta, can still drive back home, while Basel is left to face the remnants of the day on his own. The duality of Basel and Yuval punctuates the catastrophic split between the neighboring nations. In his acceptance speech in Berlin, Yuval highlighted this rupture: “I am living under a civilian war and Basel under a military war. I am free to move where I want in this land. Basel, like millions of Palestinians, is locked in the occupied West Bank. This situation of apartheid between us, this inequality has to end.”
The spiritual battle for the Palestinians continues. Nasser, Basel’s father, becomes the film’s symbol for not losing hope. When Basel was a child, Nasser and the villagers managed to build a school. Women and children were working by day, men by night. Even Tony Blair graced it with his presence, thereby giving the villagers the spotlight they needed as an example of nonviolent resistance. In Basel’s voiceover, superimposed on the archive footage of Tony Blair in Masafer Yatta, we see his uneducated father standing next to the former politician. After only eight minutes though, Blair was gone. In the present day, that same school was finally bulldozed to the ground, no high-profile politician in sight. During the scene of the school’s destruction, the woman sitting next to me in the theatre, started to loudly gulp, choking back tears.
After the final credits rolled, there was a palpable silence in the Művész Mozi theatre; the woman next to me continued to sob, while my heart felt as if it weighed a ton. No Other Land is a powerful film with rapid-fire montage sequences, a deeply personal story and an indelible emotional effect. But it is also a statement, a clarion call for solidarity. What we are witnessing now is a genocide happening in real time mired in ugly politics, hypocrisy, and injustice. Masafer Yatta is just one place, and is only one example of what is happening in other villages across the West Bank. Basel and Yuval show that friendship between a Palestinian and an Israeli is possible. Am I a fool for wanting to believe that friendship between their nations is possible, too?
Botagoz Koilybayeva
