Gotham Awards: "No Other Land"
Monday, November 11, 2024 at 4:00PM
by Nick Taylor
As part of The Film Experience’s coverage of this year’s Gotham Awards, I’ll be reviewing a handful of nomination films. Some of you may remember No Other Land from Cláudio Alves’s impassioned review from TIFF a month and a half ago. I hope you’ve been able to see it since then. If you haven’t, I hope you’re able to in the future. It's one of six films recognized by the Gothams for Best Documentary, and as per usual with this awards body, this could very well be another season where they have one of the year's strongest Doc lineups. Let my coverage of this be another endorsement for No Other Land as a staggering feat, “important” in every way a documentary like this could be, as well as a remarkably sturdy piece of filmmaking...
No Other Land follows two journalists, young men of basically the same age. One is Basel Adra, a Palestinian resident of Masafer Yatta who is following in his parent’s footsteps as an activist. The other is Yuval Abraham, who approaches Basel in 2019 with the idea of making this film to document the occupation of the West Bank. This project will last at least four years, and is largely centered on the Adra family's attempts to keep their home and their village intact as the IDF gets closer and closer to seizing their land. While they document these events, Basel and Yuval frequently discuss the history of their two countries.
Part of me wonders if the conversations these men have, thorny as they must have already been even between allies and co-conspirators, could have dug even deeper than they do into Palestine’s history under Israeli occupation, even its history predating Israel’s creation. But that’s the request of someone who has not been steeped in this history since the day they were born. Maybe these men were too focused on not being obliterated by the IDF to hash that out as fully as I’d like. Certainly these discussions are not happening whenever Yusaf goes back home to Israel, where the most visceral takeaway is a sense of peace and freedom of movement nigh impossible to find anywhere in Masafer Yatta.
At the sheer level of image-making, few films from this year are more essential than No Other Land. There’s an artfulness to the cinematography, which continuously captures the physical and emotional realities of the Adra family without aestheticizing their trauma or reducing them to icons of noble resilience. It’s brutal and immediate, a fact compounded by how the editing uses elliptical leaps forward in time or pauses to stare in paralyzed shock at yet another indignity, yet another brutal assault, each one uniquely painful even as No Other Land stresses how this is simply the continuation of a decades-long campaign against Palestinian life and dignity. By that same token, the scattered moments of joy are freed from “representing” anything except a family finding the time and resources to throw a child’s birthday party, or enjoy a hookah with your buds as you dream what a free Palestine might look like.
If you want a ground-level portrait of what living in the West Bank has been like before October 7th, a showcase for the daily humiliations and aggressions that this country has suffered for generations, here you are. More than almost any other film this year, No Other Land feels essential, both as verité cinema and a portrait of state-sanctioned apartheid that’s already been radically accelerated from the conditions we see in the five years this shows us. That’s no mean feat for a 90-minute film. And yet, I can’t help but despair when trying to ascribe urgency to this film. No Other Land does not end on a triumphant note of resilience, but on the sheer miracle of survival against ever-more-dangerous odds. As of November 11th, 2024, the date this article is to be published, Masafer Yatta is still standing, still being attacked. An op-ed published four days ago by a teacher at +972 magazine describes her efforts to keep educating her students in the middle of the warfare. It is so hard at this moment to feel hopeful for Palestine’s future, but if the occupants of Masafer Yatta can keep going, the absolute least I can do is to showcase their voices and hope it helps. I leave you with one of the last exchanges in No Other Land.
“I hope we can fix this bad reality”
“I hope”
No Other Land has been nominated for Best Documentary at the Gotham Awards. It is currently receiving a qualifying release in New York. See it if you can!
Reader Comments (3)
Truly a triumph of defiant filmmaking, resistance incarnate through the medium of cinema. In a fair and just world, this would be in serious consideration not just for Documentary Feature, but also in Picture, Director, Cinematography, and Film Editing. Its image-making and the way they are stitched together is jaw-dropping. But here's hoping it makes it in the final five despite self-distribution.
Free Palestine.
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