No Other Distribution: How Film Industry Economics and Politics Are Suppressing Docs Sympathetic to Palestine and Critical of Israel

“It’s South Africa, it’s Vietnam, it’s Jim Crow—it’s like all of these defining moments,” says filmmaker Razi Jafri by phone from East Jerusalem, referring to the ongoing war across Palestine and the Middle East. “And when the films and books start coming out, there will be a moment that’s going to break out what has been happening.” 

Because of its central place in our current geopolitics, you’d think that stories about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and its many complex facets, would rise to the level of must-see viewing across film festivals, art-house theaters, and television screens (as Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has over the last couple years). How much have the risk-averse economics of the current film business, coupled with an enduring climate of Islamophobic and political sensitivities, conspired against such work getting seen? As Muslim American filmmaker Nausheen Dadabhoy says about the documentary industry’s lack of support for this work right now, “Is it that I talked about Palestine or is it just the industry is so bad? Probably both things are true.” 

No Other Land (2024), the year’s most lauded documentary—winner of over 45 top documentary prizes and an independently funded frontrunner for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature—is the most notable example. Despite its acclaim, with international theatrical distribution deals in countries around the world, the film doesn’t yet have a U.S. distributor, and for now, has been booked independently at Film Forum in New York, as well as theaters in Los Angeles and San Francisco. “It’s a crime if it’s not out there to be seen, to spark conversations,” one of the directors, Yuval Abraham, recently told IndieWire. “Maybe some distributors are afraid to engage with the topic of Israel and Palestine, but isn’t this why we’re making documentaries[?]”

In the same interview, one of the film’s Palestinian co-directors, Basel Adra, emphasized the necessity for a broader release in the U.S., in particular. “I still believe that if there will be a change it must come from [the U.S.], from this power,” he said. “We really want people to see what their money is doing to us.”

No Other Land could very well be picked up sometime after the Academy Awards nominees announcement on January 23 (initially set for January 17, it has been postponed due to the Los Angeles wildfires), but the film has been in a particular bind. As industry insiders explained to Documentary Magazine, the larger companies who could release the film in a big way may be trepidatious about its politics, while the smaller distributors that want to acquire it don’t have the resources to support a costly awards campaign and release that a film of its critical stature and accolades would normally receive. (Cinetic Media, which is representing No Other Land for promotion and sales, declined to comment for this article.) “Certainly we’d love to get the film,” says Jonathan Miller, president of boutique distributor Icarus Films. “If there really was fear and people not wanting it, then they [Cinetic] would have called us, but they know, I assume, it will be bigger and don’t think we are big enough to bother with.” 

A representative of another small U.S. distributor, which made an offer for the film shortly after its Berlin premiere, agrees that emphasizing No Other Land’s distribution status is a deliberate sales strategy. “We were told there were a few distributors interested and they were holding back for a big streaming deal,” they say. “My personal feeling now—especially given the articles I’ve seen—is they are using [the lack of U.S. distribution] as a marketing tool while they hold out for a big payday for awards.”

One distribution executive who loves the film lays the blame solely on the constrained U.S. doc marketplace. “It’s solely an economic decision,” the executive says about the film not getting acquired. “This is the least inflammatory film on this subject; it’s just that the doc market is impossible now, especially if a film is seen as medicine or political. None of the streamers want these films.”

Indeed, without an American distribution company in place, No Other Land and other political films this year such as Union (2024, another Oscar short-listed political documentary without a U.S. distributor) can go the self-distribution route, but that limits the films’ exposure both theatrically, and more importantly, on streaming platforms. Distribution consultant and head of mTuckman Media, Michael Tuckman, who was brought on by Cinetic to facilitate the independent theatrical bookings for No Other Land (and by the producers for Union), explains that these films are particularly challenging for companies that rely on streaming deals. “These films can deliver for audiences, and they can deliver for exhibitors,” he says, citing the numerous successful festival and event screenings for these films. “But without the streaming element, it’s more difficult to deliver for traditional distributors.”

Indeed, the film’s lack of distribution is a testament to the larger indie distributors’ increasing reliance on output deals with big streaming companies. For now, at least, it doesn’t seem to have moved the needle with buyers that No Other Land’s Oscar-qualifying theatrical release at Lincoln Center’s 85-seat Howard Gilman Theater sold out 14 straight screenings in November without any added publicity or promotion. “It was remarkable,” says Florence Almozini, VP of programming at the Film at Lincoln Center. “I can’t remember the last time we sold out all screenings for a run like that.”

Mike Maggiore, a programmer of first run titles for New York’s premier art house Film Forum, who programmed No Other Land for a run in January, admits, “In most years, a film with this much acclaim would have been snapped up for its awards potential alone.” But Maggiore recognizes that such political work is not being embraced by distributors, which has given Film Forum an opening, because, as he says, “we’re in the fortunate position of being an independent, nonprofit cinema with no parent company or institution to tell us what we can or cannot show.”

“It’s Time for All These Networks to Put Their Big Boy Pants On”

“Maybe it is the whole documentary industry,” says Razi Jafri, who admits to experiencing a lot of ghosting and rejections of late. Even Rouge (2024), a “feel-good” documentary he produced about a Michigan high school basketball team, hasn’t found distribution after premiering at Hot Docs. “But as far as this topic—the genocide in Gaza, the apartheid in Palestine—that’s a no-go zone for news agencies and streamers,” he says. “They’re not taking these films.”

Veteran documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has seen the same kind of challenges for the Oscar-shortlisted documentary he produced, Alexis Bloom’s The Bibi Files (2024), which is critical of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government’s war in Gaza. The film was also not picked up for U.S. distribution and is instead being released independently on Jolt.film. Broadcasters wouldn’t touch it, says Gibney, who was recently “dismayed” when he learned that BBC executives took issue with the film because it ties Netanyahu’s corruption case specifically with his war strategy, going so far as to recommend that the filmmakers remove the connection. “It wasn’t a command,” says Gibney, “but the BBC suggested that if I might be willing to consider changing it, then they might be willing to air it.” 

“Whether in the UK or U.S., it’s time for all these networks to put their big boy pants on,” continues Gibney. “There’s a tendency now to avoid controversy so they can please as many people as possible, but it should be about encouraging vital debate about important topics of the day—and not running away from them.”

Guy Davidi, the Copenhagen-based Israeli co-director of the Oscar-nominated film 5 Broken Cameras (2011), and more recently Innocence (2022), a critical look at Israel’s pervasive war propaganda, says it’s particularly difficult to get distribution for such films in France, Germany, and the UK where “there’s a very strong Jewish population and there’s a different level of pressures on the broadcasters. I was sure a place like Channel 4 or Arte would pick up a film like Innocence,” he continues. “And it’s the same process in the U.S., where the climate is more toxic, and broadcasters are not taking on polemical subjects.”

Just this past October, Netflix removed 19 films from a collection of a 32-film package called “Palestinian Stories” that was launched in 2021. Activists protested against the streamer, calling for their reinstatement, but the company responded that the films’ removal from the platform was simply because their licenses expired. However, at the time of writing, the Palestinian Stories landing page is now completely blank on Netflix in the U.S., and major Palestinian award winners such as Paradise Now (2005), Divine Intervention (2002), and Like Twenty Impossibles (2003) are no longer on the platform.

Another filmmaker, who is of Arab descent and was granted anonymity for this article, admits, “I think there is more of a realization that our films may never make it to mainstream platforms and that we have to look for other distribution methods.”

As a response to a lack of distribution options, Hamza and Badie Ali launched Watermelon Pictures last April to “bring voice to Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims, and underrepresented voices in general,” says Hamza Ali. “When we started networking with the Arab film community, it became evidence that there was a huge chasm that needed to be filled, and nobody else was going to do it.” The Alis are Palestinian executive vice presidents of Chicago-based MPI Media Group, which is known for its genre content and horror label Dark Sky Films.

One of the company’s first releases was Erin Axelman and Sam Eilertsen’s Israelism (2023), which raises questions about Israel’s ideology and treatment of Palestinians and faced a vigorous pressure campaign by conservative Jewish activist groups during a college screening tour last year. But according to Ali, the film performed “very well” for the fledgling company on digital platforms with little pushback. Aside from some “social media trolling,” Ali admits, “honestly, it’s been more love than anything, from the Arab community and really strong support from the Jewish community, too.”

Watermelon is now ramping up for the theatrical release of Palestinian director Rashid Masharawi’s Oscar short-listed omnibus look at life in Gaza, From Ground Zero (2024), which recently got official backing from filmmaker Michael Moore and has been booked in over 100 theaters, from the Quad Cinema in New York to AMC Theaters across the country. Ali understands that other distributors might be concerned with the political perils, but “we’re very comfortable with it,” he says. “It’s the purpose of our label to be there for these kinds of films.” 

In addition to Watermelon Pictures, Razi Jafri cites new journalism sites such as Breakthrough News, Mondoweiss, Novara Media, and former MSNBC journalist Mehdi Hasan’s organization Zeteo, which just released its first documentary, Israel’s Reel Extremism (2024). They give him “hope that there are going to be other outlets that can be an option,” he says.

“Islamophobia Is So Ingrained in Our Culture”

Many filmmakers say it’s not just a risk-averse documentary business that’s impacting these films, but a more widely entrenched Islamophobia, as well. 

“None of this is surprising, because this is a longstanding problem,” says Nausheen Dadabhoy, director of the documentary An Act of Worship (2022), “because Islamophobia is so ingrained in our culture—it’s just the water that we swim in.”

Hany Abu-Assad, the twice Oscar-nominated Palestinian-Dutch director of Paradise Now and Omar (2013, one of the films formerly on Netflix), believes the more that Palestinian stories are sought out, industry gatekeepers “will be more aggressive with their restrictions towards the Palestinian experience.”

“The atmosphere is extremely hostile,” says Palestinian-British director Saeed Taji Farouky (A Thousand Fires, 2021), who is currently developing a fiction film set in Gaza. “I think it’s a combination of genuine concern from organizations—they don’t know how to navigate a difficult subject—and then this has been exacerbated by these campaigns labeling this work as antisemitic, which has created a climate of fear.”

Jude Chehab, director of the critically acclaimed 2023 Tribeca Festival award-winner Q, a personal look at her mother’s commitment to a religious cult, says she received a lot of support from institutions, funders, and sales agents during the making of her film. But after its premiere, those same sales agents ran scared. 

“I feel really jaded right now,” admits Chehab, “especially how the industry has reacted to Palestine—if a film like No Other Land can’t get distribution, what’s the point of working on a film for five years? It’s almost like people are mocking us. It makes you feel powerless.”

Razi Jafri is currently working on several Palestine-related short films, including one on Palestinian student activists in his native Michigan, which has received little support except for a grant from the Doris Duke Foundation’s Building Bridges program, but he is “pushing forward,” he says. “I’ll distribute the film myself on YouTube if I really need to, because it’s too important not to finish.”

Chehab and Dadabhoy also both argue that the documentary industry is only interested in stories about their community that fit within a circumscribed Western lens. As Dadabhoy says, “There were a lot of white people who told me, ‘Can you make me not feel bad about my Islamophobia?’” Chehab notes even Arab backers told her that Q wouldn’t work in the marketplace because the film didn’t conform to Western notions of a “liberated” Muslim female narrative because, she says, “My Mom doesn’t rip off her hijab at the end.” 

“I think there’s a way the field likes its social issue documentary,” agrees Brett Story, co-director of Union, who grew up in Palestine and has been speaking out against the war at her screenings ever since the film’s Sundance premiere. “And it’s not those films that are threatening or that implicates the audience in certain ways.” 

Story also worries that the current sensitivity around the conflict is creating a culture of self-censorship. While she acknowledges that “we live in a time of enormous silencing of voices speaking of and in solidarity with Palestine—censorship, losing one’s job, getting doxxed,” she adds, “I just think that alongside those scary stories, those of us who have not palpably felt backlash need to speak out and also reassure people that it doesn’t have to be scary to say the word Palestine or Palestinians out loud, or to recognize publicly that their human rights are being violated.”

The fears of speaking out are more complex for Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian filmmakers. Abu-Assad admits, “Absolutely, speaking out publicly against the genocide in Gaza has hurt my career. I have always known, if you speak the truth to the face of power, you will pay the price.”

Dadabhoy agrees. “Muslim filmmakers have more to lose. I think as much as people are speaking out, you see that the stakes are very high for them. Even at film festivals,” she adds, “everybody wishes this would all just go away.”

Even with a tentative ceasefire reportedly in place, films related to Palestine and Israel will persist, continuing to create points of contention for film festivals, exhibition spaces, and distribution platforms. There have been rare instances of No Other Land being pulled from festivals (in India), but there have also been fabricated controversies where films have been reportedly canceled when they weren’t even selected in the first place. Earlier this year, for example, there were reports that From Ground Zero was yanked by Cannes when, in fact, the filmmakers never received an invitation, according to the film’s publicist. This year’s Berlinale also continues to be embroiled in conflict tied to last year’s festival when the No Other Land filmmakers’ awards speech was mischaracterized as antisemitic. Recently, incoming festival director Tricia Tuttle has tried to come out in front of the issue in several interviews, while Film Workers for Palestine is calling for “#StrikeBerlinale” unless several conditions are met for this year’s edition, such as the rejection of political background checks on artists and developing a program of Palestinian films. 

Israeli filmmakers who are critical of their country are also feeling the pressure. In addition to Guy Davidi’s concerns about the distribution of Innocence, at the recent RIDM festival in Montreal, award-winning filmmaker Danae Elon pulled her film Rule of Stone, which is a critical look at the oppressively anti-Arabic construction of Jerusalem, after facing pressure from signatories of the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) because some of the film’s funding came from the Makor Foundation for Israeli Films, which receives support from Israel’s Ministry of Culture and Sport. After publicly condemning Israel’s war as genocide at the film’s IDFA premiere, Elon was surprised by the backlash. “If you think boycotting me is going to help the Palestinian cause, I’m all for it,” she says, “but I don’t see the benefit of silencing voices that are not in opposition to you, but are in alliance with you.”

But Saeed Taji Farouky, who works with the Palestinian Film Institute and supports the cultural boycott, maintains the boycott has nothing to do with the content of the films or the political stance of the filmmakers. “I would argue that now, especially in a state of emergency, we have to be even more strict adhering to the rules of the boycott, and complicit state funding makes a film liable to boycott.” Farouky also contends that by allowing one or two Israeli state-supported films that are critical of Israel to circulate at film festivals, the country creates a “release valve” where it can “claim democracy and respect different political views” while allowing it to control “the projects that best represent their version of dissent.” 

Similar to Chehab and Dadabhoy’s criticisms, Farouky says that even if some film funders and film organizations may be interested in finding ways to tap into the groundswell of support for the Palestinian cause, they’re only uplifting projects that are the most “inoffensive and centrist,” whether “a feel-good story” or “two-sides story.” 

“What I’m seeing about the Palestinian work that is being supported now is that it tends to be a very isolated personal expression,” he says. “But God forbid you make any connections to the right to resist or international liberation movements.”

Anthony Kaufman is a freelance journalist and regular contributor to his Substack; film instructor at New School and DePaul Universities; and senior programmer at the Chicago International Film Festival and the Doc10 film festival.