No Other Land took me back to the 2011 documentary, Five Broken Cameras, for more reasons than one, but first and foremost for having been made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective—unimaginable, given the world’s most ceaseless, remorseless and longest ongoing conflict, that is escalating to engulf the Middle-East, with no ceasefire in sight. While Five Broken Cameras, a Palestine-Israel-France co-production, had been directed together by a Palestinian farmer turned self-taught photographer Emad Burnat and an Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi, No Other Land, a Palestine-Norway co-production, is the debut directorial of four activists-journalists-filmmakers—Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor—from the two sides of the political divide. Adra and Ballal are Palestinians and Abraham and Szor are Israelis.
The film had its premiere in the Panorama section of Berlinale earlier in February this year where it won the Berlinale Documentary Award and the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary. It recently played at the Toronto International Film Festival and the Busan International Film Festival and features in the World Cinema section of the upcoming Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI).
How No Other Land managed to take shape could well be the subject of a separate film. A case of cinema rising above disputes to become a marker of artistic resistance and human solidarity. Abraham got in touch with Adra, as an Israeli journalist covering the conflict. The friendship blossomed while working together on articles from the area which is when the idea of the film was also born. However, that doesn’t stop the film from shining a light on the terrible inequities across the two sides of the divide. Adra and Abraham might have formed a rare bond but, instead of levelling the disparities, it throws the former’s oppression in sharp relief against the latter’s freedom. For example, the moment when Abraham hopes for the elusive stability when Adra would be able to visit him rather than him having to visit Adra. To which Adra’s response is a monosyllabic "maybe". It's something both the friends observe and reflect on as the camera bears witness and records.
Like Five Broken Cameras, No Other Land is also an unwavering chronicle of the steady destruction and erasure of a country and its people. In Five Broken Cameras, Burnat diligently chronicled the protests in his hometown Bil’in in the West Bank where the agricultural lands and olive groves were getting seized by Israeli settlers, the army, and police.
No Other Land captures the forced displacement of people by Israel’s army in Adra’s homeland Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, something that he has been witnessing since childhood. There are video archives of Adra, his family and neighbours filmed over the course of the last 20 years. “I started filming when we started to end,” says Adra in a poignant moment in the film. Then there is the fresh footage by the film’s cinematographer and co-director Szor. The handheld camera, at considerable risk to itself and the person wielding it, unleashes the bulldozer mayhem of the occupiers in all its horror, bringing down homes and settlements, evicting the inhabitants, forcing them to move into and set up homes in dark and dank caves. All to build an Israeli military training camp in the land but the larger agenda of turning an entire community and civilization to dust.
Then there is the barbarism in targeting children. The painstakingly put-together footage is particularly horrifying in exposing how childhoods have been impaired over several decades in Palestine and not just in the here and the now.
A self-reflexive film on the besieged homeland, in which the personal is the political, No Other Land is a vital, urgent documentation of the human toll of conflict and a searing critique of war crimes and violence, state atrocities and authoritarianism. A documentary that is not just extremely moving and poignant but also incredibly powerful and riveting.