No Other Land

Academy awards winner documentary, a close documentation from inside of a hateful coward aggression by authoritarian and supremacist state of Israel. Anyone who is not complicit in the genocide of the Palestinian people will feel very outraged by watching the scenes of criminal violence and destruction (besides robbery and even murder) by Israeli Army and their allies, the racist invaders responsible for Zionist ilegal settlements in occupied Palestine. And how amazing is the brave resistance of people in Masafar Yatta! Congratulations for the skilked debuting filmmakers and collective of activists, composed by two Palestinians (Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal) and two Israeli (Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor), not engaged in jingoistic fanaticism but in defendending what is the fair and correct.

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.

Incredibly hard to watch, but vital. The viewpoint we in North America are not allowed to see. Documentation of the devastation wrought by modern day colonialism, which needs to remembered, and recognized. History is being made and it the film makers are telling the side of the oppressed, who have been ignored for too long! Please do what you can to see this film. When the powers that be don't want you to see something, you know it is something that needs attention. Beautifully shot, devastating footage of atrocious settler actions, tearing down schools, children crying, violence being committed against villagers, it is incredible how many atrocious acts the filmmakers were able to record.

"...He's a journalist that wants to write about the demolitions. - But does anyone actually care to read about it? - Honestly, not many."

And just like that, No Other Land became my favorite Oscar winner from the last ceremony, as this film may be one of the most significant and best documentary works for humanity in the 21st century. A joint effort by Palestinians and Israelis, led by Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamadan Billal, and Rachel Szor, set out to document the heartbreaking events in the occupied West Bank, where Palestinian villages are illegally and forcibly demolished, homes and schools disappear, and farmers' land is seized-leaving them with caves as their only refuge in the land where they were born. Exile or a bullet-those are their remaining options, all for the purpose of creating space for IDF military training grounds...

A film that exposes the greatest human disgrace of our time, revealing how deeply evil, oppression, fascism, and racism can take root in the human heart, but also how vast, yet powerless, human suffering can be. It also reminds us that, without a tyrannical regime, a life of mutual solidarity, respect, and friendship is not only possible but natural. This is something that manifests a cry for freedom, for our attention... a cry for something that should be a fundamental right of every decent human being.

Without exception, you all must watch this.

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.