No Other Land

Masafer Yatta is a collection of 19 Palestinian hamlets in the southern West Bank, and a space that has seen demolition and deportation tear through its heart in recent history. It acts as the setting for this documentary from directors Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Rachel Szor and Hamdan Ballal, a film made by the Palestinian-Israeli collective to show the chaos and ruin that has befallen the region and its people.

Taking the viewer back in time and giving you a front-row seat to the destruction, No Other Land centres on the struggles faced by Palestinian journalist Basel Adra as he tries to preserve his West Bank village from Israeli settlers. In 2022, the occupants of Masafer Yatta were forced to leave by the Israeli military, who claimed the land for training, flattening homes and livelihoods in the process. The directors use Adra’s home footage of the events to make you see and feel the raw desperation with your own eyes.

The beauty of the film comes in its art, something provided stunningly by Israeli cinematographer and editor Rachel Szor. Because of her cinematography, it is easy to forget that what we are watching is in fact a documentary about real people, entirely in the form of metanarrative and snippets of moments in history. It could be argued that No Other Land isn’t even a documentary at all, as it isn’t trying to push any narrative from either side, but instead acts as an observing eye over events for the viewer to interpret.

You take heart in the fact that even in their darkest hour the displaced must find a reason to smile, and the blossoming relationship between Abraham and Adra builds on this ray of light. While nothing changes and hope appears to be almost lost entirely, what unravels on screen is as gripping as it is harrowing. Loyalties are tested and it appears everyone is nervous on all sides, shown in all it’s upsetting light when a young man is shot by an Israeli soldier, and while moments of respite appear in the form of conversations between the two men, they too are soon shattered by the reminder of ever-present violence.

No Other Land won the top documentary prize at the Berlin Film Festival in February and more recently the film won the Best Documentary Award at the Gotham Awards, Hollywood’s first major ceremony of the season, indicating that a promising few months await the Palestinian and Israeli directors. The creative team will hope their film can make a difference by telling the brutal truth of a bleak situation.

Guy Lambert

No Other Land is released in select cinemas on 8^th November 2024.

Watch the trailer for No Other Land here: