Rodrigo BAZZANO

Communication Audiovisual Officer

by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor
Norway, Palestine, 2024

The essence of No Other Land is, paraphrasing a famous feminist slogan, the radical notion that Palestinians are people. They gather for dinner, chat about life, joke and laugh. They work, study, open businesses and start families.

Basel Adra, co-director and main character, is a young Palestinian from Masafer Yatta, a group of villages declared a military zone by Israel, making every building there illegal. With his camera, Basel captures the daily life of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.

A line of bulldozers, military jeeps and Israeli trucks appear unannounced. Soldiers and officials step out to demolish houses and schools, or fill water wells with concrete. Palestinians, children in their arms, flee their homes screaming. When asked ‘why?’  Israeli officials reply they are simply following the law. If a Palestinian gets too close, they shoot to kill. Despite the stunning violence, they are mostly normal, mediocre people who follow orders. While destroying the lives of defenceless people, they hide behind bureaucratic responses, the kind you would hear at a traffic office. In Hanna Arendt’s words, it’s the banality of evil.

This brilliant Palestinian-Israeli documentary allows us to witness injustice as if we were there. We also watch the evolving friendship between Basel and Yuval Abraham, a young Israeli journalist and co-director of the film who has chosen not to look away. “I live under civil law and Basel lives under military law. We reside just 30 minutes apart; I have the right to vote, but Basel does not. I can move freely, while Basel, like millions of Palestinians, is confined within the West Bank”, Yuval said at the Berlinale Film Festival.

More than 3 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem’s occupied territories, in a regime Amnesty International defined as “apartheid” and a “cruel system of domination”. Another two million are crowded into the Gaza Strip, an ‘open-air prison’ now reduced to rubbles by Israel, in what the ICJ described as a plausible case of genocide.

In his Oscar acceptance speech, Basel said, “I hope that [my daughter] will not have to live the same life I am living now, always fearing settlers’ violence, home demolitions and forcible displacements”. Only a few weeks later, Palestinian co-director Hamdan Ballal was brutally attacked by Israeli settlers and arrested by the military.

Although we may feel hopeless, the co-directors invite us to “act now […] for a future where we can live in peace, equality and dignity for all”.