In spite of the clinical approach the filmmakers bring to No Other Land, the activist documentary nevertheless enrages. It boggles the mind (and moral compass) to watch ludicrously overarmed Israeli forces repeatedly destroy the homes, schools, and water-supply systems of Palestinian families who have lived on the land in question since before the establishment of the state of Israel. The footage was captured, beginning around 2019, by an Israeli-Palestinian collective: Basel Adra, a Palestinian lawyer, journalist, and filmmaker who grew up in Masafer Yatta, the area undergoing expulsion; Yuval Abraham, an Israeli filmmaker and investigative journalist; Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian photographer, filmmaker, and farmer; and Rachel Szor, an Israeli cinematographer, editor, and director. (All are credited as writers and directors on No Other Land; Adra and Abraham’s hesitant onscreen friendship offers one of the film’s more intimate elements.) Aside from the video documentation of the demolitions—which includes, at one point, a soldier shooting an unarmed man over a struggle to keep his family’s generator—we get vignettes of everyday life for the villagers, in which quotidian observations carry an element of unspoken anguish. While being driven to school, a smiling girl looks out the window and starts a playful chant that doubles as a cry for dignity: “We have grass — it exists! We have a mountain — it exists! We have a chicken house – it exists! We have a house — it exists!” No Other Land exists to document that she knows what she’s talking about.
(2/13/2025)
