The winner of the 2024 Berlinale Documentary Award, No Other Land, still doesn’t have a US distributor, even though it is being screened at cinemas and film festivals all across the globe and has received widespread critical acclaim. Why?
The media response to codirectors Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra’s acceptance speech in Berlin might give some indication. Various media outlets and even the German minister of culture, Claudia Roth, claimed that the speech was one-sided and antisemitic because it was critical of Israel and called for a cease-fire in Gaza and an arms embargo from the West.
Abraham, a Jewish Israeli who is descended from Holocaust survivors, received such an inundation of death threats that he delayed his return home to Israel. Later, when a video surfaced of Roth applauding during the acceptance speech, she clarified that she was only clapping for Abraham, not for Adra, who is Palestinian.
In 1981, Israel designated nearly 7,500 acres of Masafer Yatta, a constellation of Israeli-occupied Palestinian villages in the South Hebron Hills of the West Bank, as a firing zone for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), a common legal tactic to expel Palestinians. The minister of agriculture at the time, Ariel Sharon, issued this particular order.
After Israel displaced hundreds of families in Masafer Yatta in the late ’90s, a group of Palestinian residents appealed to Israel’s High Court to stop the expulsion. The High Court issued a temporary injunction that allowed families to return but strictly curtailed what they could do. In this span of…
Auteur: Jennifer Lenow
