This rage- and pain-filled documentary from a quartet of Palestinian and Israeli film-makers was the subject of a somewhat surreal statement from the German culture minister Claudia Roth at this year’s Berlin film festival. She had been in the closing gala audience applauding when it won a prize, and later said she was clapping Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, not his Palestinian co-director Basel Adra, when they collected the award. It was an unhappy demonstration of enduring division.
No Other Land is about Masafer Yatta, a collection of Palestinian villages in the West Bank whose thousand-plus occupants were, in 2022, ordered to leave because the Israeli military needed the area as a training zone – and so began the long, bitter process of bulldozers being sent in, accompanied by soldiers who were grimly unmoved by residents’ desperate protests. Local Palestinian resident Basel Adra had been for years recording his community’s harassment on video, but this film also records his remarkable relationship with Israeli photojournalist Yuval Abraham, with whom he collaborated on this film along with Hamdan Balla and Rachel Szor.
There is pure anguish when a local man is shot by soldiers and becomes paralysed below the chest and, with his devastated elderly mother, mutely receives a stream of international journalists, whose well-meaning reports achieve nothing. Adra himself grimly recalls that the only outsider whose appearance had any effect was Tony Blair, who, as special envoy of the Middle East Quartet, visited Masafer Yatta back in 2009 (the archive footage shows his face set in a kind of opaque semi-grimace of sympathy). His visit did appear to help, if only for a short while.
As for Abraham, his presence in the Masafer Yatta community is increasingly tense, as many there find it hard to accept his loyalties: “It could be your brother or your friend who destroyed my home!” (In fact, the film doesn’t interview Abraham’s family or friends for their views.) It closes with a bittersweet dialogue between the two men, whose friendship has clearly been deepened by the experience and by the film, while both are aware of how little has really changed. A sombre, sobering work.
• No Other Land is in UK and Irish cinemas from 8 November, and Australian cinemas from 21 November.
