‘No Other Land’: Oscar winner Laura Poitras hosts NY screening, but Palestinian doc still seeks US distribution
“This is a film that I love dearly. I think we use the word urgent a little bit not with as much intention as we should. And I think a film like this really occupies that word,” said Oscar winner Laura Poitras (“Citizenfour“), introducing a special screening of the documentary “No Other Land” at Scandinavia House in New York City on October 14. The film chronicles the efforts of the Israeli military and settlers to displace the Palestinian population of the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank, as seen from the point of view of Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who co-directed the film with Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor. Abraham and Adra participated in a virtual Q&A from Israel and the West Bank, respectively, moderated by Oscar nominee Yance Ford (“Strong Island“).
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“I think the experience of being in New York was a little bit strange, like a different world, and also just because of the amount of death and atrocities that are happening every day here,” explained Abraham about the experience of bringing the film recently to the New York Film Festival. “It feels sometimes like a dissonance or a disconnect.” But returning home felt “very similar. There is a lot of uncertainty, it’s very hard to imagine a future, and just constant feeling of dread from the violence that is constantly continuing. So it’s not easy, but I think we are hoping that through the film now, alongside the work that we do, the journalist work and the activist work that we’re doing on the ground, I think the film is also giving us some meaning.”
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Ford feels that “one of the most powerful things about documentary film is that it has the ability to bear witness,” but Adra “didn’t study filmmaking or even journalism.” He and his fellow activists “were just documenting things going on on the ground … because documentation is very important for us. About five years ago, Yuval and Rachel came here to Masafer Yatta through other activists.” They wanted to cover the demolitions as journalists, but “then they started coming back more and more to the area.” It was Ballal who “actually brought the idea that we want to make something bigger” than social media videos. “And we agreed, the four of us, to start work on the movie. It was our first experience doing long documentary.”
Unfortunately, “there’s no distribution yet in the US which is for us disappointing,” noted Abraham. “We really hope this will change in the next months because one of the reasons why we made the film is really because the United States is a very important audience for us.” It’s a uniquely American problem, though, because “in the rest of the world, the distribution is going very well. In Europe and in Southeast Asia, the film found distribution and will, in November, be in theaters in many different countries.” But despite the lack of official distribution across the US, the film will have an Oscar-qualifying run starting on November 1 at Film at Lincoln Center, and it wouldn’t be the first recognition of Palestine by the motion picture academy. For instance, Hany Abu-Assad‘s “Paradise Now” (2005) and “Omar” (2013) were both nominated for Best International Feature, and Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi‘s “5 Broken Cameras” (2012) competed for Best Documentary Feature.
The United States has long given aid and diplomatic support to Israel, “so every screening really matters.” Considering how the US responded to the invasion of Ukraine by Russia compared to the invasions of Gaza and the West Bank by Israel, Abraham argues, “There’s a lot of hypocrisy here. The main reason is because Israel is considered to be an ally of the United States.” Added Adra, “We never thought that something like the Nakba will be happening in our days because we, to be honest, believed that the world will not allow this to happen … Nobody’s doing anything to stop this, and we don’t know if it can stop at all.”
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