‘No Other Land’ Review: Basel Adra’s Palestinian Doc is a Story of Survival and Resilience and Demands Your Attention | TIFF

I have to imagine that one of the most difficult parts of making a documentary is that when real life writes the plot, you really don’t know the movie you’re making until you’ve finished making it. No Other Land began production in the West Bank villages of Masafer Yatta in 2019 – though featuring footage its subject/co-director Basel Adra shot over years before, all the way back to his childhood – and finished production in October 2023.

Having won both jury and audience awards for Best Documentary at the Berlinale, No Other Land is now the “watch once and never again” must-see documentary of the fall festival season, an opportunity to better understand the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and how we got to the horrors of the current war. Within the film, Basel and his Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham (two more directors, the Palestinian Hamdan Ballal and the Israeli Rachel Szor, are also credited but stay offscreen) have a few conversations about how much attention they can get with their journalism and if other people will care. The past year has shown just how many people do care, but also the limits to how much caring can achieve in the face of a powerful government with increasingly blatant genocidal intentions and institutions failing and/or refusing to do anything about it. And make no mistake: this institutional failure includes film festivals – from the No Other Land filmmakers being wrongly accused of “antisemitism” for their Berlinale acceptance speeches to SXSW accepting sponsorships from weapons manufacturers (they agreed to stop three months after wide boycotts of the 2024 festival) to the mass booing of pro-Palestinian protesters at the opening night of TIFF, the major film festivals have continually failed to meet this moment.

Basel comes from a family of activists. It’s almost a foregone conclusion that if your family comes from Masafer Yatta, they’d have to be activists just to keep living there. The Israeli government denies the villages exist and has claimed the land for a military training zone; under Oslo, it falls under Area C, placing it under complete Israeli control without any level of PLO governance. As a kid, Basel filmed his father protesting demolitions of people’s homes. As an adult, he’s trying to stop the same still-ongoing destruction, which only escalates after the Israeli Supreme Court gives its approval to settlements in the area.

How does anyone keep going in a seemingly endless intolerable situation? Basel demonstrates resilience, patience, and a long-term vision. When Yuval complains about his articles not getting enough views to make a difference, Basel mocks his ambitions of easy saviordom: “You think you can end the occupation in 10 days and go home?” To my mind, the Palestinian activist’s message to his Jewish ally is teaching him one of the most important messages of Judaism, as written in the Mishnah: “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you at liberty to neglect it.”

There have been temporary victories amidst all the loss: we learn a visit from Tony Blair was enough to protect Masafer Yatta’s only school for a while, we see Basel’s journalism pick up broader attention in the mainstream media, and at one point, a routine of three protests a week seems to slow down the Israeli forces. The biggest victory, however, is that the people of Masafer Yatta keep living. If their houses get destroyed, they’ll take all their belongings and set up homes in caves. That’s still a terrible situation – especially for Basel’s neighbor Harun, in bad health after Israeli soldiers shot and paralyzed him – but the ingenuity to make this awful situation work at all is impressive. The children still play around and have fun like all children do, something the documentary highlights in moments of welcome relief. The adults, meanwhile, keep rebuilding even as the Israeli army keeps destroying (in one scene, when Yuval helps out with building a house, Basel notes the irony that while Israelis in the West Bank are usually there to destroy buildings, the only jobs Israelis typically hire Palestinians for are construction jobs).

Does having to constantly fight for his home take a toll on Basel? Of course it does. He needs his hookah breaks and his days off from activism. And he makes it very clear that Yuval, for all his high-minded intentions as an ally, is never going to understand what it’s like to go through all this. Neither Basel nor Yosef know what it will take to end the occupation and form a true democratic state with equal rights for all, but in their efforts of resistance, it’s possible to imagine a timeline where No Other Land might inspire something resembling hope.

But how could that hope survive a film that ends in October 2023, where the far-right Netanyahu government used the undeniable evils of Hamas’ terror attack as justification to wage a campaign of even more evils against all Palestinians? The movie ends with footage of Basel’s cousin getting gunned down by settlers – how do you even process that image? What are we supposed to make of a celebration of people’s persistence and resilience in defense of their home when the ending takeaway is that things have gotten so much worse that everyone pretty much HAS to move for their own safety?

One wonders if the other big Palestinian feature at TIFF, the Gazan anthology film From Ground Zero, might be better equipped to answer some of these questions for the current moment due to its more recent production, and if that’s why it beat No Other Land as Palestine’s submission for the Best International Feature Oscar. Or maybe No Other Land is going to be Finland’s submission instead due to co-production credits. It certainly deserves to be in the race, as well as for Best Documentary, assuming it gets US distribution in time. Deciding on a grade for a film like this – undeniably important, skillfully made, naturally hard to watch, and by necessity unable to offer a fully comprehensive view of the tragedy it chronicles – feels arbitrary, but it demands attention.

Grade: B+

This review is from the Toronto International Film Festival. There is currently no U.S. distribution.

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Reuben Baron

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