Documentaries of Dissent

A reader comes to a piece of criticism with a basic assumption: the critic is writing about a work that the reader can eventually go and seek out herself. Reviews are premised on an ideal of access and distribution—art leaving the private realm to meet communal air. Never mind how classist or lazy or obsolete the tastes of the critic; she ought to be a conduit for the “seeing” of the thing. This has long been the nature of the critic-reader bond in America.

With “No Other Land,” a documentary directed by a collective of filmmakers—Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, who are Palestinian, and Rachal Szor and Yuval Abraham, who are Israeli—I write hampered, knowing that the reader may not be able to view it. The film tracks the slow demolition of Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian villages near Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, by the Israeli military, which in recent years tried to clear the land in order to build an Army training ground. Though the film has done the rounds on the international circuit for nearly a year, it has not been picked up for American distribution. Earlier this month, the film had a weeklong run at Lincoln Center—which allows it to qualify for next year’s Oscars—but this barely amounts to a wide release. In an interview with the Associated Press in the days leading up to the election, Abraham surmised that the fate of the film was tied to the fate of the race, that companies were hedging their bets on a revivified Trump era.

And yet the inability to see this film in the U.S. is functionally an act of censorship driven by forces that pre-date the election. As an event, the film has brought to the fore the conditional tolerance of the European and American markets when it comes to Palestinian work. At this year’s Berlinale, where the film won an award, Abraham, an Israeli journalist, and Adra, a young Palestinian lawyer, who narrates the documentary, gave a speech expressing opposition to Israel’s assault on Gaza. The German culture minister, Claudia Roth, who was in attendance, applauded the remarks. But after a backlash against the directors, who were smeared as antisemitic, Roth clarified that her applause had been meant only for the Israeli filmmaker, not the Palestinian.

A work like “No Other Land” could not exist solely within the confines of its text in any year, and certainly not in this one—a year of mechanized killing and displacement. A clock has been set, with October 7, 2023, marked as the origin point of all violence. The mere chronology of “No Other Land,” shot in the West Bank from 2019 to 2023, should undo that sense of retrofitted order. “I started filming when we started to end,” Adra narrates. He is a slight physical presence; slight, too, in voice-over. He can sound spent. The opening shots, of Adra driving at night to a site of new dispossession, anchor us in his perspective, which is not only personal but social. There are yellow men and green men, Adra says at one point in the film, referring to the West Bank’s segregated road system. Adra, a green man, drives encumbered. There are lines that he and his camera cannot cross. His lens becomes the locus of apartheid. When Adra is holding his device, whether it be a camera or a phone, our sight becomes Palestinian, to paraphrase the June Jordan poem. It is a perspective of enclosure. Adra does sousveillance of the Israeli forces, who descend on the villages with bulldozers and loaded guns. His hold on the camera is shaky but resolute. He often announces his purpose, that he is documenting the destruction of his land. The soldiers swat him down, chase him, threaten him. Ilan, a bureaucrat organizing the demolitions, is a character marked by a vacuum. We do and do not know him—this man who coolly signs papers, wielding his pen as the lethal instrument that it is. His complexity is shrunk to his immoral profession. Another documentary might have tried to follow Ilan, to give us a sense of his biography or his family. “No Other Land” does not have that choice. It must stay in its zone of confinement.

Abraham, who has come to Masafer Yatta to report on the demolition, moves with degrees more freedom. (Upon his arrival, he is sized up, jokingly, suspiciously, as a “human-rights Israeli.”) You will return home to Be’er Sheva, Adra sometimes tells him, as they decompress over cigarettes. And, indeed, long shots, presumably filmed by Szor, the Israeli cinematographer, capture Abraham leaving Masafer Yatta to visit his mother. Abraham’s expression can twist into one of guilt. Or is it something else? His sense of powerlessness about his own advantage? The film is a strong picture of comradeship under apartheid. It is a discourse film as well. At night, Abraham and Adra help the men in the village who are trying to rebuild homes. The work enlivens Abraham. It was through learning Arabic that he developed his left-wing politics. The work drains Adra. Although he has earned a law degree, he cannot practice. He is the son of activists who have devoted their lives to protecting the land. He feels that he does not have the energy of his father, who is arrested in the film. Adra is indefatigable—organizing protests, writing online, moving cement blocks under the cover of night—but he is sunk in ennui.

“No Other Land” is of international scope. The film shows a protest. Residents carry a banner; its message is written in English, making explicit a connection to American imperialism: “Palestinian Lives Matter.” A legal battle, spanning more than twenty-two years, brings the land dispute in Masafer Yatta to the Israeli Supreme Court, where judges finally decide against the Palestinian contingent, concluding that the evictions are legal. The documentary has a loping structure. The seasons march forward, the bulldozers return. Settlers come, abetted by soldiers. The expulsion is violent and capricious. Women, men, and children have been driven underground, setting up salvaged mattresses and televisions in caves. A soldier shoots Harun Abu Aram, a young man in his twenties, paralyzing him. He begins to live life on a pallet in a cave, his mother bereft beside him. So many of the images in “No Other Land” are composed with a legacy of exploitation on the mind. Abu Aram is seen askance, he is shrouded, to preserve his dignity. One concern of the film is the extractive nature of activist journalism. Is it enough to document a life? What about saving one? The film becomes meta, capturing journalists visiting families, who resent having to display their misery to garner attention. Abraham feels despair when one of his articles fails to gain traction. He has to believe that desegregation is possible within his lifetime. Adra, on the other hand, experiences time differently. He understands that his struggle was his father’s, and his father’s before him. The film’s coda underscores this distension of time. It is footage of a settler shooting Adra’s cousin point-blank, shortly after October 7th.