Basel Adra (L) and Yuval Abraham (R). Image credit: Eman Mohammad
In 1996, Basel Adra, one of the four co-directors of the film No Other Land, was born in the Palestinian community of Masafer Yatta, an area of 20 small villages in the mountains of the West Bank. The fields of Masafer Yatta have limitless horizons, unadorned by high-rises. Its hills are dotted with historic stone dwellings which, as Adra says, “appear on maps from the 19th century.” Masafer Yatta can be seen on British maps of the area as recently as 1945.
However, the Israeli state does not recognize that the community exists, and thus it does not appear on Israeli maps, rendering it vacant space. And land that is supposedly vacant is ripe for occupation. In 1980, Israel turned its military sights on Masafer Yatta due to its strategic proximity to the border, as Adra and co-director Yuval Abraham recounted in a piece published in The Nation in 2023. The IDF began attempting to displace the residents of the community to make room for an Israeli tank training facility. These military “firing zones,” as later admitted by the former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, were a tactic to vacate and then reserve land in the West Bank for Israeli settlers.
Adra was born to a family of activists who, as he says, knew the power of a camera as a legal tool. His father began prolifically filming soon after Basel was born, as did many other activists in the community. When matters of violence against Masafer Yatta’s inhabitants by the IDF were taken to court, the perpetrators would flatly deny carrying out these actions, so it only made sense to have a visual record on hand. This continued process of documenting resulted in a considerable archive of footage before production of No Other Land had even begun, and many examples of such videos appear in the film. Most of the video is meant to capture illegal road closures or IDF soldiers forcing Palestinian occupants off their own private land, though an amusing, digressive, and unconstructive flyby by former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also makes an appearance.
No Other Land begins, in medias res, in 2019, as Israeli construction vehicles appear on the hillsides in the dead of night and prepare to drive out residents by systematically demolishing Masafer Yatta’s infrastructure. Immediately after, we witness the arrival of Abraham, an Israeli investigative journalist, to Adra’s home, who is greeted with terse but polite suspicion from Adra’s family. Among the other activists and journalists who began to frequent the village as it strived to oppose occupation were Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian farmer, photographer, and human rights researcher from Susiya, a neighboring village in the South Hebron Hills, and Rachel Szor, an Israeli visual journalist. The three began to stay with Adra frequently, week after week, and became well acquainted, at which point Ballal suggested the four collaborate on a longform documentary. It was an easy decision, according to Adra and Abraham, as by that point the four had spent a considerable amount of time together and developed a sense of trust.
As a collective, the four committed to a decision-making process that required the agreement of all parties—if any of the four directors objected to a shot or sentiment, it would not be included. By way of example, Abraham was interested in the caste system of the Israeli workers sent into Masafer Yatta to demolish its homes, schools, and infrastructure—those in command were of European descent and those expected to do the physical labor were from Arab countries. Adra countered that this was of no interest to him as a Palestinian—they were all Israeli settlers who had come to destroy his home, after all—and this aspect of the film was dropped.
I tell Abraham and Adra that this level of nonhierarchical co-directing is nearly unheard of in Western nonfiction. They remind me that the making of the film was not born of any particular desire to be documentary filmmakers—none of the four had any experience in doing so—but of a simple necessity to record the encroaching settler forces upon the West Bank. “Often people think about filmmaking in a capitalist way,” Abraham admits, “as if there is one ‘genius’ director making the film, but our experience was entirely communal.”
In 2022, the Israeli high court officially ruled against the protests of Masafer Yatta’s residents. If the IDF is successful in their still-ongoing onslaught it would be the single largest mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homes in the West Bank since 1967. While Israel’s current siege on Gaza displaces hundreds of thousands, West Bank Palestinians are driven from their homes by a variety of legal pretexts. During the day, Israeli wrecking crews demolish the homes of Masafer Yatta’s families. As the sun sets, the families attempt to rebuild the structures with whatever materials they have available. As day breaks, the IDF returns to confiscate the building material. And so on.
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Fast-forward to 2024—I am speaking with Adra and Abraham before the film’s first screening at the New York Film Festival. Hamdan Ballal could not obtain a visa to exit the West Bank to attend the festival and was also choosing to stay in Susiya, where his family was at that moment facing expulsion at the hands of the IDF. The four had made a mutual agreement that, regardless of whatever prohibitive circumstances were thrown their way, an equal number of Palestinian and Israeli co-directors would speak to the press at all times, and so Rachel Szor abstained from the interview. Adra and Abraham both appear exhausted: Abraham’s family has faced constant aggravated harassment since the film first premiered. Just days earlier, Adra’s father was kidnapped, bound, and held by Israeli forces. Also days before the interview, the filmmakers signed a still-growing call by NYFF participants for the festival to divest from Bloomberg Philanthropies, a partner in the Bloomberg-Sagol Center for City Leadership, bolstering infrastructure in Israeli settlements in the West Bank that were declared illegal by the International Court of Justice.
In the aftermath of October 7, 2023, the word “timely” plagues conversations and writings about No Other Land, despite the film’s refuting these claims by grounding its narrative in several decades of footage. In Isabella Hammad’s pre-October 7 lecture Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, the novelist speaks of writer and theorist Edward Said’s interest in the elusive narrative structure of apartheid: “We hope for resolution, or at least we hope that retrospectively what felt like a crisis will turn out to have been a turning point.” No Other Land—despite its expertly defined and engrossing narrative—does not have a resolution, and neither does the moment into which it was birthed. Instead, the film has a stated hope for a resolution. In an early scene, Adra says, “If we are active and we document on the ground, it will force the United States to pressure Israel… to stop the expulsion.”
On October 1, 2024, introducing the second screening of the film at NYFF, Abraham announced that the collective would not be staying for the post-screening Q&A, and that their remaining appearances would be canceled due to escalating violence in the region as the IDF advanced upon Lebanon. Abraham and Adra had spoken to their families and decided that “it felt wrong to stay here as things were deteriorating and escalating back home.” Abraham reiterated a statement that he had given me a few days earlier, that while the film documented a war crime in-progress that had been going on for “a long, long time,” both the film and the existence of their Israeli-Palestinian coalition are pleas “for a different future”; a future of “no occupation” and “mutual security.”
The specter of time—patience and memory—haunts the film. In a scene of Adra and Abraham driving, Abraham frets that the articles he is writing are not getting enough views. “I feel you’re… a little enthusiastic,” Adra says tentatively, to Abraham’s confusion. “You want everything to happen quickly, as if you came to solve everything in 10 days and then go back home.” There’s a brief pause, and then he continues: “This has been going on for decades. Get used to failing, you’re a loser now.”
I am reminded again of Hammad’s lecture, describing well-meaning human rights activists—much like Abraham—visiting Palestine:
| They visited Hebron, and saw the soldiers patrolling, guarding settlers; they visited the destroyed town of al-Lydd; they navigated checkpoints; they traveled through Jerusalem and crossed in and out of the West Bank; they listened to statistics of killings and imprisonments and nighttime raids and asked careful questions. They seemed genuinely changed by the experience. I was moved to see them moved. At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel a kind of despairing déjà vu, the scene of recognition having become at this point rather familiar. |
I ask the two co-directors if there were ever discussions around how to best utilize the footage during filming, as they were documenting a dangerous and rapidly unfolding situation over the course of five years—should their work be saved and hoarded for the benefit of the feature film that they are producing, or broadcast out on social media channels in real time? Abraham and Adra point to an especially brutal and tense sequence in the film as a case study for their approach: in November of 2022, the IDF targeted a local elementary school for destruction on a day when class was in session. “Up to this point,” Abraham tells me, “[the IDF] had avoided targeting schools because they were afraid of the way it would harm Israel’s image.” The attack on the school is shown in No Other Land from the perspective of someone standing inside. Soldiers and two bulldozers surround the building. Children scream, and the older students help the younger ones escape through windows. Then, the school is destroyed.
“When we filmed this happening,” Abraham remembers, “it was clear to us that we would not ‘save’ this for the film. We immediately posted it.” This event is also recounted by the two in their 2023 article for The Nation. “But a film is not a snapshot,” Abraham continues. “Now, we constantly see these snapshots of violence. Even if this material was already published online, [in a film,] a scene gets its meaning from the scene before it and the scene after it… You see the development over the years; you know Basel and you know he is the one holding the camera.”
No Other Land switches freely between informative action images and longer, slower, subdued moments, usually capturing intimate conversations that reflect Abraham and Adra’s developing friendship, a friendship of alleged impossibility. These scenes, and the emphasis on character, intimacy, and empathy, are what sets the film apart from other “protest docs.” As documentary editors, we are often warned about the easy production value but staid, numbing narrative effect of scenes of banners, marches, and violence. Especially in contemporary times, when images of brutality by authoritative forces are so easily and readily captured and traded, they can blur together into a cacophony: Gunshots! Swirling handheld cameras! Voices in unison! The heavy breathing of the cameraperson! These long somber moments of camaraderie show that the collective knows that simply exposing contemporary violence is not enough.
The scenes of conversation, captured at night, are some of Szor’s best camerawork, successfully utilizing what little light is available (typically the construction lamps erected for the eventide rebuilding) and holding on shots for a considerable amount of time. In them, Abraham and Adra smoke heavily, fret about cell phone screen time, worry about Adra’s oft-arrested father, and wonder about the possibility of running away together, across the Mediterranean. Both men are certainly media-savvy—the film shows montages of them appearing on viral Instagram stories and Democracy Now—but they are both naturalistic and believable subjects, clearly torn between their duties as activists and their protectiveness toward their families.
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Such a naked narrative allegiance between an Israeli and a Palestinian media-maker is a rare sight in the West. In 2020’s Palestine: A Socialist Introduction, Palestinian writer Sumaya Awad writes that “the Nation-State Law passed in 2018 strips Palestinians of their right to self-determination and downgrades all aspects of Palestinian identity—from the Arabic language to the right of Palestinians to narrate their own history,” and points to the void left by the barring and deportation of journalists, activists, and human rights groups from the region as tools to silence Palestinians. So few instances of collective, boundaryless storytelling exist. For example, 2011’s Academy Award–nominated documentary Five Broken Cameras, although credited as being collaboratively directed by the Palestinian Emad Burnat—a farmer and activist in the West Bank—and the Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi, was in actuality made using Burnat’s footage but compiled and edited by Davidi and supported by Israeli state funding. Burnat was, tellingly, detained at Los Angeles International Airport when he attempted to attend the Oscar ceremony, while Davidi still referred to the film as “Palestinian.” This is a distinction between what Hammad would refer to as “anagnorisis”—the moment an Israeli recognizes that a Palestinian is a human being—and first-person self-narrativization.
For the No Other Land team, true self-narrativization meant no involvement by the Israeli film industry. The quartet looked elsewhere for fiscal and material support, though, as Abraham and Adra clarified, “most of what we did was volunteer work.” Szor was able to take the footage that the collective had shot and apply for support from the Close Up Initiative, an organization based in Belgium that provides development and mentorship opportunities to filmmakers in the Middle East. One advantage of Close Up, in the collective’s eyes, is that it is entirely independently funded—the four had concretely decided to not accept any funds tied to investments from the Israeli state. Participation in Close Up connected Szor to the Norwegian production company Antipode Films, which opened up postproduction funding for the project. The program also, according to Abraham, gave the filmmakers a feeling of solidarity and companionship as they met and learned beside other documentarians from Iran, Jordan, Yemen, and elsewhere.
While the Israeli co-directors could travel freely during postproduction, Ballal and Adra were not allowed to leave the West Bank, which presented a considerable challenge for a documentary prescribed to an ideal of collective decision-making. It was decided that the film would be edited in Masafer Yatta. As Adra’s home had been demolished by Israeli forces, work was carried out in the cave beneath his home, as you can see in the film. In addition to the usual delays caused by a collaborative approach to story breaking and scene editing, this “was not always so easy,” Abraham regales dryly. Electricity to the community was consistently being cut. Raids happened frequently during the night. Hard drives had to be hidden away and stashed in bathrooms. Adra was already a known target for his family’s hosting of activists and journalists, something the IDF “hated,” Adra says with emphatic stress. Five cameras and a laptop were confiscated, resulting in a several months-long legal battle to get them back. “When you’re editing,” Abraham reminded me solemnly, “you’re looking at violence on screen while it is ongoing outside as well. This results in an added layer of tension. You may see it in the film. We were feeling it.”
No Other Land arrived at the New York Film Festival—at the time of writing, still without American distribution—just under the one-year anniversary of the events of October 7, 2023. Its path has been tumultuous. The filmmakers could not participate in the CPH:DOX screening as Adra did not receive a visa. Before that screening, while accepting the Best Documentary Award at the Berlinale in February 2024, Abraham restated the film’s portrayal of legal systemic inequality between himself and Adra, only to receive a wave of death threats against himself and his family.
“We made this movie imagining a horizon of political change,” Adra says to me, a wave of fatigue crossing his face, “and the movie may be succeeding, the movie may be managing, but things are moving in the opposite direction. The situation on the ground is very bad… More demolitions, more communities fleeing from their homes in the area.” Even writing about the film’s transcendent triumphs in style and narrative has become a temporally uneasy task. No Other Land should not be so simply slotted as timely, but as a timeless example of empathetic collaboration, and the presentation of a radical choice for the future: equity or destruction.
Mackenzie Lukenbill is an audiovisual archivist and documentary editor. They have contributed writing to The Baffler, BOMB Magazine, and frieze.