No Other Land

I usually steer clear of political discussions - not because I lack opinions, quite the opposite - but because even those who claim to be open-minded and well-educated often struggle to engage in meaningful conversations without turning them into hostile debates.

Too often, discussions dissolve into battles of empty rhetoric rather than genuine exchanges of ideas.

That said, "No Other Land" is not an easy documentary to review. Created by a group of Palestinian and Israeli activist filmmakers, it captures the destruction of Masafer Yatta, a cluster of villages in the southern West Bank.

Once home to generations, this land has been transformed into an Israeli military training ground, rendering its residents' presence - and even the act of rebuilding their demolished homes - illegal.

Filmmakers Basel Adra, Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, Palestinian director and farmer Hamdan Ballal, and Israeli cinematographer Rachel Szor present the harsh reality with raw honesty.

There's no embellishment, no forced emotional manipulation - just the infuriating truth. The film doesn't tell us anything new about war crimes, occupation, or the fight for Palestinian sovereignty. Instead, it shows us what those words truly mean for the people living them every day.

Why is this documentary so important? Oscar or no Oscar, "No Other Land" is perhaps the most authentic depiction of life under occupation - a stark contrast to the shocking, sensationalized videos that flood social media.

Not that those clips aren't real, but let's be honest - most of us have no idea what life on the ground actually looks like. We aren't there, on the frontlines, facing the devastation firsthand.

This film strips away the spectacle of war, the manufactured narratives, and the distant outrage. Instead, it presents the quiet resilience of a people fighting to preserve what little remains of their homes, culture, and dignity.

No dramatization, no spectacle - just silence, destruction, and the unbearable weight of injustice.

Perhaps it's easier to look away, to stay in a comfort zone of selective outrage while ignoring the real crimes happening in plain sight.

But "No Other Land" makes looking away impossible.

If this documentary is still playing at a theater near you, don't hesitate - go see it.

Be ready to witness a raw, unfiltered reality that rarely makes it to mainstream screens. Let it challenge you, make you uncomfortable, and most importantly, make you think about the truth this collective is revealing.

The winner of this years Best Documentary Feature at the Oscars (despite not having a major distributor for release in the United States), No Other Land is a warts and all account of a relatively unknown struggle taking place in West Bank's Masafer Yatta region where local Palestinian residents are battle occupation at the hands of Israeli forces.

A collaboration between directors Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, with Abraham and Adra front and centre to this DIY as the two join forces to help protest and cover the multi-decade spanning battle, Land may not provide anything ground-breaking from a filmmaking sense but its a powerful reminder of the voice cinema can have when it comes to issues that deserve the publics attention.

Making for likable faces to a very confronting and traumatic subject matter, Adra and Ballal arm themselves with handheld cameras and phones to capture years worth of footage as the Israeli military undertakes an increasingly intense operation to flatten the Masafer Yatta community on its way to developing a "military training ground", amounting to a perilous and intense journey that acts as a heartfelt call to action to halt the mistreatment of this populated area of the West Bank.

There's no particular rhyme or reason to the way Land unfolds, a product of the fluid nature of the filming that was merely there to capture what was unfolding not manufacture it, Land may lack a central narrative destination there's little mystery as to why this little film that could has managed to make such a big mark across the globe over the past 12 months with it harbouring a humanistic message at its core that makes us all realise that day to day tensions and carnage in the Middle East is increasingly running at boiling point.

Not easy viewing by any stretch of the imagination, witnessing peoples lives be destroyed before your very eyes its hard to bare and Land refuses to shy away from the casualties of its examination as innocent bystanders are shot and beaten on camera, showcasing the harsh realities of what happens when a corrupt force is allowed to run rampant.

An important piece of modern day documentary filmmaking, Land isn't perfect and is unquestionably rough around the edges but its essential viewing to anyone with a keen interest in journalistic feature film and anyone seeking to gain insights into current global situations that we should all be across.

Final Say -

A worthy Oscar winner that shines a light on a little known yet important topic, No Other Land is an insightful piece of filmmaking bought to life by two invested and reasonable central figures.

4 petrol stations out of 5

Jordan and Eddie (The Movie Guys)

No Other Land is one of the most important documentaries of this present moment -- it is a shame (but not a surprise) that it's become somewhat difficult to find/see anywhere.

Like 20 Days in Mariupol did with Russia's 2022 siege of Mariupol in Ukraine, it speaks to us bluntly right from the eye of the storm, that storm being the Israeli occupation of Palestine (chiefly the demolition of the filmmaker's home region in the West Bank, in this case). It may seem infantile to use terms like "pure evil", but there's basically no other way to describe some of what we witness in this footage.

It also involves a fascinating friendship, as Palestinian activist Basel Adra, who documents the gradual ruination of his home in Masafer Yatta on video, finds a connection with an Israeli journalist named Yuval Abraham, who wishes to help him, even as it becomes clear he can never quite understand his struggle. Nevertheless, their material became this film; both are credited as directors and writers alongside Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor, who is also Israeli.

Why this film would be inconvenient for Israel-sympathizers is obvious (when the film began to receive awards recognition, the IDF promptly surrounded Adra's home). But its central friendship -- and the fact that the friend in question demonstrably agreed to help get this movie made -- likely makes it inconvenient for those who use this conflict as an excuse for anti-Semitism, asserting that any Israeli person or even any Jewish person is fair game to brand a monster, if not outright kill.

Fact is, there are plenty like Abraham and Szor. For as much as Zionists like to insist that all "true" Jewish people ARE, in fact, on board with the whole Zionism thing (and in so doing they effectively agree with the aforementioned anti-Semites), there are several Jewish people and indeed Israeli citizens who are aghast at the idea that their ancestors survived The Holocaust only for the descendants to rework "Never again" into "Never again... to us".

I don't know the route to a happy Middle East any more than the next person; that it will never be achieved if Israel continues on its current path seems certain. Defenders of the Israeli state dislike the use of the term "settler-colonialism" to describe what has been happening, but it's hard to find an alternative for the bleak reality shown in this film, a collaboration between a Palestinian facing eviction from the family land in the West Bank and a sympathetic Israeli. That collaboration is perhaps the only heartening thing in an otherwise deeply depressing, but important, film. Tellingly, it was all shot before autumn 2023; it's hard to believe that anything has got better since then.

No Other Land was a quieter kind of angry than I was expecting, but I think that approach is the kind of thing that could well change a person's mind on the whole ordeal if they were to seek this out. I guess with documentaries on subjects like this, getting someone who already feels a certain way to watch this when they might want to otherwise resist an alternate point of view is the difficult part, but there's still a lot of madness in the world, and the approaches that have been taken to sway people haven't really been working.

So it's not that No Other Land reinvents the documentary genre as a whole, but I think it has a distinctive way of presenting its central thesis. It's not peaceful, but there is a quietness to it that will likely lead some people to reflect on what they might've thought about before. Again, if they were to watch No Other Land in the first place. That's a whole other obstacle. But the approach here is more than sound and it's quietly powerful, and I'd hope that's an ultimately effective way to do it.

This did have some slower moments as far as the editing goes, but there were other sequences that had fantastic editing, and there's some striking imagery in here, too. I don't think it's a perfect documentary but it is an important one ("important" is a word I'm sure every review of this has used, oh well). Watch it regardless of how you feel about the conflict in question and I think it will help, so long as you go in open-minded. It's not necessarily subtle (and it shouldn't be), but it isn't aggressive, and if it does change minds - which I hope it can - I think that might be the reason why.