This Oscar-Nominated Documentary Deserves Your Full Attention

Sometimes, acts of daily living can be a radical act. Survival can be resistance.

That’s a running theme throughout the powerful documentary “No Other Land,” which was just nominated for this year’s Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. Directed, edited and produced by an Israeli-Palestinian team, it follows one of the filmmakers, Basel Adra, and his family and neighbors in the Palestinian community of Masafer Yatta, a region of mountainous villages in the West Bank. Masafer Yatta’s residents have endured decades of Israeli occupation and forced expulsions. The film, shot over a period of four years beginning in 2019, documents the Israeli government’s increasingly aggressive means of forcibly evicting the residents.

Though most of the film was completed shortly before the start of the war that has decimated Gaza, it could not be more timely. But “No Other Land” has yet to land a major distributor in the United States, despite garnering acclaim from festivals, critics and awards organizations. It is hard to find the film playing anywhere, aside from a few limited theatrical runs in New York City, including one that begins Friday at Film Forum. It will also be released in Los Angeles on Feb. 7.

The filmmakers believe this lack of access to the film is “completely political,” as co-director Yuval Abraham said in a recent interview with Variety. “We’re obviously talking about the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, and it’s very ugly. The film is very, very critical of Israeli policies. As an Israeli, I think that’s a really good thing, because we need to be critical of these policies so they can change. But I think the conversation in the United States appears to be far less nuanced — there is much less space for this kind of criticism, even when it comes in the form of a film.”

As Adra explains during the film: “This is a story about power. I grew up hearing it.”

Whose stories get told and seen, and whose do not — that’s power, too.

Power is also central to the Masafer Yatta residents’ fight to keep their villages intact. In 2022, after a decades-long legal battle, an Israeli court — a court where, as Adra notes in a voiceover narration, Palestinians have no power — orders the villages to be destroyed and repurposed as a training ground for the Israeli Defense Forces. As a result, the Israeli government accelerates its attempts to expel the residents of Masafer Yatta.

Over the course of the documentary, we see the residents facing more and more restrictions and intimidation. When the residents hold a peaceful protest, they’re interrupted by grenades. IDF members accost their children.

The government sends bulldozers to the homes of those who try to hold out and bars them from driving cars in the villages. Residents who try to rebuild face a byzantine process of obtaining building permits. Even if they manage to cobble together a new home, smaller and less sturdy than before, the Israeli government can still cut off their access to basic needs: In one scene, Israeli officials fill in a water well and slice open the pipes.

The encroachment and the aggression — it’s all designed to eventually drive the Palestinian residents out.

“Every week, a new family must decide: endure or leave their land,” Adra says. “If a family leaves, they lose their land.”

Parallel to these wrenching stories of destruction, oppression and uncertainty is one about friendship. Early in the film, Adra begins working with Abraham, an Israeli journalist who is trying to raise awareness of the forced expulsions through his reporting — and who, as an Israeli, opposes what his government is doing in his name.

The two become friends, and some of the film’s more quietly compelling scenes are the long, thoughtful conversations between them. In one of their exchanges, Abraham complains one of his recent articles didn’t get many views and is exasperated that not enough people are paying attention.

“You want everything to happen quickly, as if you came to solve everything in 10 days and then go back home,” Adra, whose family has spent years mobilizing against the forced expulsions, tells him. “This has been going on for decades.”

“Get used to failing,” he adds.

As an Israeli, Abraham can move about relatively unencumbered. Unlike Adra, at the end of the day, he can go home, a tension the two of them discuss at several points in the film.

It’s these quotidian scenes, peppered throughout the film — conversations, meals, and other acts of daily life — that form many of its most moving moments. The camera lingers on the residents of Masafer Yatta as they go about routine tasks and take care of each other. Life goes on.

In such a tense film, full of harrowing footage — much of which was shot on the filmmakers’ phones to quickly document scenes of escalation — there’s so much grace in these snapshots of daily life.

The film is also interspersed with home videos from Adra’s childhood. Some of these clips are included to demonstrate how long the residents have fought to preserve their community and resist their forced displacement. But they also show scenes of joy and nostalgia.

“No Other Land” forces us to not look away or attempt to tune out. But it’s also an ode to a vibrant community. And in a time when everything feels so heavy, it’s a reminder that fighting to preserve community is how we endure and survive.