I saw No Other Land about a week before its Oscar win for Best Documentary Feature. I’ve been sitting on it and digesting it in the time since, thinking about what (or even if) I should write about it. As a document, it speaks for itself.
Basel Adra opens the film with a voiceover, narrating footage taken of him at the tender age of nine. It is the first (but certainly not the last) time that Basel and his family are captured on film being forced to leave their home in Palestine under invading colonial forces. He tells us about how his father’s activism inspired his own. Through no fault of his own, his entire existence has been one spent on the edge of the knife and in the intersection between two barrels: the gun that seeks to push him out and the camera lens which documents his and others’ lives under apartheid. Masafer Yatta is the place in question, a region in the occupied West Bank, which has been declared (by the Israeli high court) to be annexed for use as a military training ground. Throughout the footage, taken over years, people are forced out of their homes by men and women in uniform who have only one refrain: “It is the law,” they say. “It is the law; it is the law.” And with each time they repeat it one can’t help but hear what they are actually saying, in the present as it was said in the past: “We are only following orders.” It is no defense.
In many ways, No Other Land documents much less outright violence than one would expect. We’ve all spent an unbelievable length of time bearing witness to much more depraved acts of violence against the people of Palestine than are recorded here, although this film is not without horror, of course. During one protest we see Israeli soldiers open fire on a group of civilians, paralyzing one of them. The same man later dies after his home (a tent) is destroyed and the inhabitants of Masafer Yatta are forced to scatter to a series of caves for refuge; he succumbs to infection there. It is this man’s mother who gives the film its title, speaking of the fact that there is nowhere else to go. We also see Basel’s father shot at another point later in the film, and Basel is forced to give up on his activism for a time so that he can operate the area’s only gasoline dispensary, his father’s business, as its operation is vital for the area, at least until further settler invasion forces the forfeiture of all vehicles as the vice grip of their organized terrorism continues to tighten around the peoples of Palestine.
The other primary lens through which we see the activities other than Basel’s is that of Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who is able to come and go freely from the ravaged area, and although he develops a deep and abiding friendship with Basel, the privilege of movement that he enjoys remains a sharp dividing line between the men. Yuval also comes face to face with people who appreciate his mission but doubt his ability to make any real changes, and when Yuval’s missives fail to reach larger audiences, he loses hope quickly while Basel and his people understand that this is an effort that could (and likely will) consume their lives and their lifetimes.
One thing that particularly struck me was how this documentary works in conversation with Ernest Cole: Lost and Found. In particular, when watching Basel’s friend be shot and become quadriplegic, I remembered the segment of Lost and Found wherein the voiceover explained the monetary compensation that the apartheid regime enforced on the native South Africans. A specific dollar amount was assigned for the loss of a limb, or for total loss of one’s ability to work in the mines. Even under what we now recognize unilaterally as a genocidal and evil colonial practice, there were more protections (measly and inhumane ones, to be sure) for the people who were crushed under the heel of colonization. Lost and Found also featured many photographs of Cole and his community’s homes being demolished as well as images of the cookie cutter housing put up on their former land to be occupied by settlers. No Other Land features almost the exact same imagery, except that instead of photographs, it’s video of tractors and bulldozers demolishing the homes of the disenfranchised. Together, the two films tell a story about generational evil, the methods of control that are enacted across decades through violence and intimidation, and the way that world leaders are largely indifferent to suffering. What that conversation between them does positively is give me hope. Ernest Cole, like Moses, was exiled and never allowed to see the Promised Land, as he died within weeks of Mandela’s release, but South African apartheid did end, even if he never got to enjoy the fruits of his activism. If South Africa could be freed, then so too can Palestine.
-Mark “Boomer” Redmond
