Within a few minutes into the Oscar-nominated documentary, we see Israeli soldiers barging into a village after a court order is given to demolish Palestinian homes in Masafer Yatta of the occupied southern West Bank. A handheld camera captures bulldozers violently tearing down homes while the villagers protest. “We have no other land,” an elderly woman helplessly tells reporters.
The dispossessed Palestinian families are pushed into makeshift rooms inside caves. During the night, a little girl who has just witnessed the horrors of intimidation and violence by Israeli soldiers tosses and turns in her bed, as if swirling. Her mother, tired, trying hard to sleep, feels restless too.
“What are you doing?” she asks.
“I am spinning so nobody catches me,” the girl replies.
The heartbreaking moment recalls the poignant lines of Palestinian-Canadian poet Rafeef Ziadah: “We Palestinians teach life after they have occupied the last sky.”
Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor, and Yuval Abraham’s No Other Land, nominated for Best Documentary in Sunday’s Academy Awards, is one of the most politically pressing films of our time — a robust document of occupation and destruction and a testimony to friendship, solidarity, and resistance. Produced by a Palestinian-Israeli film collective, No Other Land documents the devastation of several villages in Masafer Yatta by Israeli forces prior to the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack.
Over the years, Adra, a young Palestinian activist and journalist, has been documenting Israeli efforts to evict these villagers. After a demolition in the summer of 2019, he met Israeli journalist Abraham, and their friendship grew. The two of them, along with Palestinian photographer Hamdan Ballal and Israeli…
Auteur: Agnitra Ghosh
