Now that almost all of the year’s documentaries have premiered, it’s clear that there will be none more essential than Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor’s No Other Land. Premiering at Berlinale earlier this year where it won the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film, the film from the Palestinian-Israeli collective takes an intimate, harrowing look at the day-to-day destruction and violence inflicted on Palestinian lives in the West Bank. Still somehow without distribution, the NYFF selection will still get a one-week qualifying run at NYC’s Film at Lincoln Center starting next week, to be eligible for various critics and awards bodies list, hopefully leading to greater attention. Ahead of the release, a new trailer has now arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “This eye-opening, vérité-style documentary, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four directors over the course of five years, provides a harrowing account of the systematic onslaught of destruction experienced by Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank, at the hands of the Israeli military. Headed by Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham (also two of the film’s directors), the collective commits itself to filming and protesting the demolitions of homes and schools and the resulting displacement of their inhabitants, which were carried out to make way for Israeli military training ground. In addition to the indelible footage of destruction and expulsion captured by its undaunted witnesses, No Other Land serves as a moving portrait of friendship between Adra and Abraham, who form a philosophical and political alliance despite the drastic differences in their abilities to exist freely in this world. Winner of multiple awards including the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film at the 2024 Berlinale. An NYFF62 Main Slate selection.”
Rory O’Connor said in his review, “Something that’s occasionally forgotten amongst the carnage and statistics of recent events is how relentless (and calculated) the decades of conflict have been on regular Palestinian lives: the daily humiliations faced by anyone forced to pass through a checkpoint to get to work; or the endless micro and macro aggressions visited on those living near the border. The latter is what is witnessed in No Other Land, a powerful documentary premiering today at the Berlinale that follows the friendship of Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist and West Bank native, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli investigative journalist who joins his cause. Beginning in 2019 and running all the way up to December of last year, the film provides a vital document of the erasure of Adra’s region, Masafer Yatta––an organized offensive that is described in the press notes as “the largest single act of forced transfer ever carried out in the occupied West Bank.”
See the trailer below along with the 62nd New York Film Festival Q&A.