No Other Land Movie Review — Berlinale 2024 — Sucharita Tyagi
Understanding the ongoing humanitarian nightmare in Palestine is no simple task. The issue is neither new nor straightforward, and certainly not something one can fully comprehend from outside the country.
Allow these award-winning filmmakers to take you to the heart of it, to Gaza, and show you just a glimpse of life as the Palestinians now know it.
“No Other Land,” which won the Best Documentary Award and the Panorama Audience award. Directed by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, No Other Land is as much about the events it portrays as it is about the people documenting them.
As I prepared myself for the release of Dune 2 this week, I rewatched part 1 on the flight en route to Berlin. A work of fiction that many have debated borrows heavily from real life, in particular the impact of Western imperialism in the Middle East. Author Frank Herbert’s vision has been discussed and dissected ad nauseam, but as I watched ‘No Other Land’ only a few days later, the fact that both Dune and this documentary start with a very similar voiceover stood out sharply. In the former, you hear Zendaya’s voice talk about how her once-fertile planet Arrakis was invaded by the Emperor, who sent the “outsiders,” the Harkonnens, to loot it of its natural resources, and how she has grown up watching the atrocities unfold. In No Other Land, you hear its Palestinian director and journalist, Basel Adra, say the same about his village of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank.
I draw the parallel above not to trivialize the occupation in Palestine by comparing it to sci-fi, but only to try and wrap my own head around the film world’s difference in reaction to these two movies about “desert people.” One is a massive Hollywood blockbuster we are queuing up to watch, me included. The other wins awards at an international film festival, only for their speeches addressing the CONTENT of the very movie to be called one-sided, inviting death threats.
“No Other Land” is made by four filmmakers: Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal from Palestine, and Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor from Israel. Together they are credited with writing, directing, and editing the film, which spans from the summer of 2019 right up until the winter of 2023. The text at the end mentions that filming wrapped up before October of last year. Basel Adra’s voice succinctly but unhurriedly tells you about the time he first realized his parents were activists and the realization of the importance of resistance in their lives. The film isn’t a larger commentary on the crisis as a whole but chooses to focus only on how families and villages continue to be displaced in Masafer Yatta, a region in the West Bank. Basel, armed with a camera, social media, and a press card, records videos and organizes community protests against people invading the lands. Through his eyes, you see not just the strife of the people of Masafer Yatta, but also their dismay towards the apathy shown by the rest of the world.
In one scene, he talks with his Israeli co-director Yuval about the importance of mainstream media covering the ongoing expulsions; in another, he talks about the one time British Prime Minister Tony Blair visited and how the streets he walked were spared from demolition. “This is a story about power,” Basel says. And so, almost to stir SOME sympathy or even anger in the viewing audience, Basel’s coverage focuses heavily on how women and children continue to suffer in Masafer Yatta as things get worse each day. In a chilling scene, Israeli bulldozers eventually do show up to demolish a school Tony Blair had visited. Inexplicably, children are locked inside a classroom and have to escape through windows before the building is destroyed. The team ALSO shows you many MANY children standing up to heavily armed guards. Teenagers look down the barrel of a gun and ask questions, each shot more devastating than the last. Cars are forcefully confiscated from locals to prevent movement as bulldozers, which have become a symbol of oppression not just in Palestine, roll in and out day and night.
There are many scenes of residents lugging their belongings out of homes that are about to be demolished — mattresses, cupboards, washing machines — denied the basic right to live and use these mundane, boring daily objects. The film itself is not loud; it doesn’t yell at you or make you feel bad for not paying attention. It’s almost languid, even when it shows you protests. Like Basel and his family, the film too is calm and calculated. The shaky, unstable camerawork adds to the realism, asking the viewer what Adra asks himself, “Somebody watches something. They are touched. And then?”
There is no way to predict when and how this film will get a release, but keep an eye out for it. In the interim, you can go to Yuval Abraham’s Twitter page and watch their award acceptance speech!
