The Oscar-winning documentary shows how precarious life is for the residents of Masafer Yatta, a collection of 19 Palestinian hamlets in the southern West Bank, and contrasts it with the more privileged existence of Israelis.
Throughout the film, we see how the Palestinian community responds to the systematic destruction of their homes. Because there is no hope of challenging Israel’s military might directly, they must engage in asymmetrical resistance.
No Other Land bears witness to this struggle, telling an old story in a new way.
This isn’t the kind of documentary with expert talking heads or footage captured by mainstream news organisations. What the film shows us instead is the work of its subjects, recording their experiences as they happen.
Our focal point is Basel Adra, a resident of Masafer Yatta. We see how dislocation affects his family and friends and compare his situation with that of Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who befriends him.
Whereas Adra and his family are hemmed in on all sides, unable to do much of anything without the explicit permission of Israeli authorities, Abraham enjoys much greater liberty.
Although Adra and other members of his community document their lives, it is only because of his connection with Abraham and the international support that their collaboration is able to leverage that their story reaches a broad audience.
It was once the case that the technical requirements of filmmaking prevented oppressed and impoverished people from telling their stories visually. Now, in the era of inexpensive mobile devices and digital distribution, the biggest challenge is not capturing footage or even making it available but finding a way to stand out within an ever-growing glut of DiY content.
That’s where editing comes in. No Other Land was able to make a significant impact because thousands of hours of recordings made between 2019 and 2023, and a wealth of archival material, were distilled into a manageable length.
Neither Adra nor his fellow Palestinian co-director Hamdan Ballal had experience putting films together. Neither did Abraham. They needed help to bring their vision to life. Documentary editor Anne Fabini helped them to shape the vast quantity of raw material into a coherent and compelling narrative.
This is true even when a brief event is presented.
In one of the film’s many heartbreaking scenes of destruction, we see a bulldozer entering the community as chickens scatter in its wake. Shots of community members shouting in anger and despair follow as Israeli soldiers stand impassively between them and the bulldozer. Then, we see children milling around the collapsed dwelling, along with some of the chickens.
What took hours to unfold has been compressed into a minute. This isn’t surprising. Documentary films necessarily condense experience. Decisions about what to cut out and what to leave in determine whether the audience’s interest will be sustained. By turning the raw footage of this event into the sort of montage found in fictional narratives, the sort that we are trained to comprehend, No Other Land succeeds where countless news segments about Israel’s mistreatment of Palestinians have failed.
That’s undoubtedly why the film was able to win over voters and earn the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, despite Hollywood’s past resistance to stories that portray Israel in a negative light.
Winning the Oscar did make the film a target.
Not only did No Other Land’s portrayal of Israel’s actions in the West Bank add to the country’s international publicity woes, but the short speech given by the film’s Palestinian co-director put the war in Gaza front and centre.
Predictably, a pro-Israel public relations campaign emerged almost overnight to undercut No Other Land’s credibility. In addition to the official response of the government, right-wing pundits shared videos suggesting that the documentary seriously misrepresents the reality of the situation in the West Bank, where an intricate checkerboard of Palestinian and Israeli territory makes the seeing-is-believing mindset problematic.
The relationship between documentary filmmaking and truth is a complex one.
When we watch a fictional movie, we know that there is deceit involved. Part of the thrill in learning what happens behind the scenes derives from the exposure of this trickery.
It could be a special-effects sequence in which a small-scale model is used to render an object that is supposed to be massive, as was the case in the original Star Wars trilogy.
Or it could be something as deceptively simple as being reminded that a conversation filmed in a series of close-up shots and reverse shots erases the place from which the camera captures those images, thereby suturing over the wound that technology creates when it’s inserted into reality.
In either case, discovering how a scene was filmed does not necessarily diminish our pleasure in the finished product and might actually enhance it.
With documentary films, by contrast, our reaction to behind-the-scenes footage is likely to be negative, particularly if the finished product does not give a clear sense of how it was made.
For this reason, when someone sets out to challenge a film like No Other Land, they focus on what the film doesn’t show: the details that end up on the cutting-room floor.
It’s telling that, as of right now, the only way to see No Other Land in the United States is to find one of the few independent theatres willing to screen it. Attacks on the film, by contrast, are easy to find, surfacing whenever someone searches for “No Other Land.”
Although works are still actively suppressed in the so-called free world, it is more common these days for them to be drowned out by competing voices, often with assistance from social media algorithms that the average person cannot discern.
In classic filmmaking, the point was to make the camera disappear, creating an illusion of immediacy by hiding the technology necessary to capture a scene. Nowadays, we are so accustomed to seeing cameras everywhere that concealing their presence no longer has the same impact.
The technological wound that gets sutured over today is not the intrusion of filmmaking equipment but the algorithms that determine what we see and where we see it.
That’s why we need to seek out films like No Other Land and watch them while we have the chance.
Please support The Battleground. Subscribe to our free newsletter and make a donation to ensure our continued growth and independence.
Screenshot courtesy of No Other Land. All rights reserved.
