TIFF '24: From the River to the Sea

by Cláudio Alves

At the Berlinale, NO OTHER LAND won the Best Documentary and Panorama Audience awards.

The 2024 edition of the Toronto International Film Festival was marked by multiple instances of political protest. PETA came for Pharrell Williams, and the documentary Russians at War had its screenings delayed until after the official festival in response to the public outcry against it. While some organizers, guests, and audience members may have grumbled about it, one should expect such demonstrations at an event that purports "to transform the way people see the world" and lead in the "creative and cultural discovery through the moving image." Like every art form, cinema is political – everything is political – and a festival's program can delineate allegiances and avenues of dialogue. In its search for plurality, it can also illuminate contradictions of its own. 

In the realm of political cinema, No Other Land and From Ground Zero, two of the year's most essential films, were screened at TIFF. Both works deal with the plight of the Palestinian people…

NO OTHER LAND, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham & Rachel Szor 

This all started long before October 7th, 2023. Indeed, when discussing his earliest memory, Palestinian journalist Basel Adra describes being awoken by a light in the middle of the night. They had come for his father, the first of the patriarch's many arrests. At seven, there was the first protest he can ever remember attending, and it was at that time he realized his parents were activists. His has been a life defined by occupation, like those of all Palestinians since the 1948 Nakba. Even childhood memories are contextualized around oppression and the fight against it. By talking about the collective through the particular of Adra and his family, No Other Land becomes bigger than any of its makers. 

Its shape is that of a video diary transformed through a friendship, a dialogue with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. The conversation springs from a common interest, a collaborative documentation of what's happening in the West Bank, as entire villages are destroyed in the name of Israel's territorial expansion. Such is the case of Masafer Yatta, the mountain community in the southern part of the West Bank where Adra was born, grew up in, and resides. Theirs is an ongoing struggle that goes back to before these two ever met. Indeed, after a long 22-year process before the Israeli courts, the villagers were told that their home was to be turned into a military training ground for the same forces that terrorize them. It's naught but a ploy to stop the Arab families from working their own land, and facilitate its criminal conquest. Everyone knows it. 

And so, entire lives, personal and material histories of incalculable value, are torn down by excavators right in front of the cameras. It's unthinkable. Yet, for the people of Masafer Yatta, it's the life they've always known under occupation. Even the sheep pens must be bulldozed, the animals scattered or massacred in the effort to make the Arab contingent into strangers in their own land. It's of no consequence that the village appears in 19th-century maps that precede the very existence of Israel. Nothing matters when those who clamor for justice aren't seen as human in the eyes of their oppressors. As if in formalist response, much of the editing in the early portions of the film cuts around the aggressors, perceiving their actions through the movement of machinery, their aftermath and destruction. 

That being said, No Other Land also makes good use of its Israeli co-creators, whose freedom of movement is a shocking contrast to Adra's state-sanctioned immobility. The camera goes into the Israeli settlements where Arab people cannot enter, witnessing the cookie cutter-suburban sprawl that's built upon the obliterated remains of Palestinian villages. Consider those visions of Westernized comfort in relation to what the people of Masafer Yatta must endure, taking refuge in the local caves. And even that state of affairs comes under military scrutiny, with the family generator stolen – officially confiscated – so that their surviving becomes near impossible. There's a wanton cruelty to such actions. One that almost reverberates through the screen as digital camerawork transitions to cellphone footage in the struggle to document it all. 

Nevertheless, not all of the film is dedicated to the direct portrayal of injustice. There's space to contemplate its subjects as more than just martyrs, glimpses into small joys and personhood. It's imperative the audience recognizes their humanity, not just their symbolic properties or statistical factor in the cataloging of Israeli atrocities. Such efforts to show a variety of experience, not just ardor, exult No Other Land's principal tenet of Humanism. And after all, sometimes to look at horror alone can be too much, more of an anesthesia than a spark of awareness. In one of the film's most haunting moments – the one used for most of its promotional material – Adra can't look anymore. He averts his eyes from the faraway wreck, the destruction, the suffering of one more family made homeless by the settlers' advance.

What separates No Other Land from other such urgent works of non-fiction film is the power of individual images like that one. The entire cinematic edifice is filled with them, frames so powerful they seem to cry in protest and demand a reaction. Take Adra's little siblings framed against the movement of tanks or the destruction of their home. Think of the night footage and how the lights in darkness summon the feeling of hell on earth. Then there's the filming of soldiers intruding upon an elementary school and stopping classes, militarized imagery against the smallness of children. The school is another target, one more building to be razed. Even the waterlines are targets, wells blocked with cement.

In the end, the documentary is an excavation of collective memories and the trauma of those victimized by an apartheid state. It's a gutting, shattering experience that leaves you inflamed with rage. But there's a light in the darkness, the brightness of resistance, perseverance to the bitter end. Beyond their value as cinema, films like this are crucial because, if no one records the truth, it'd be like nothing happened to the outside world. So, the documentary commands attention and asks that its audience acknowledge the images presented. It delivers a mission, a duty of not letting its story become invisible like so much of the Palestinian people's struggle. In this conjuncture, the camera becomes a weapon, exposing the truth the propaganda machine of the genocidal state would erase. Masafer Yatta stands, and don't you forget it.

FROM GROUND ZERO, Wissam Moussa, Nidal Damo, Alaa Ayoub, Karim Satoum, Bashar Al Babisi, Khamis Masharawi, Neda'a Abu Hassnah, Tamer Nijim, Ahmed Al Danaf, Rima Mahmoud, Muhammad Al Sharif, Basil El Maqousi, Mustafa Al Nabih, Rabab Khamis, Mustafa Kulab, Alaa Damo, Hana Eleiwa, Mahdi Kreirah, Aws Al Banna, Islam Al Zeriei, Etimad Washah & Ahmad Hassunah

The official Palestinian submission for the 97th Academy Awards is a collective and collectivist effort. More than a feature, it's a spread of twenty-two short films, each conceived by an individual given total freedom to express themselves as someone living in the Gaza Strip during the current crisis. As a work of political resistance, a radical eye-opener with inklings of lyricism from within a world on fire, it's a complex piece to contextualize or compare to other films. I was reminded most of the queer rebellion of Valencia, a kaleidoscope that's as prone to total transformation as From Ground Zero. Another possibility would be Silvered Water, a 2014 Syrian self-portrait that presents footage captured from within a conflict rather than without.

Still, for all that one might reach for comparison, there's nothing quite like From Ground Zero out there. So much so that its screening was an oddity within the TIFF experience, with reinforced security measures and the presence of an active listener to help spectators who needed to step out for a moment. Part of the film's team was present – though none of the directors, for obvious reasons – and there was an intermission in the middle to offer a breather, an opportunity for reflection and further information about this unique project. Unsurprisingly, it was shared that many filmmakers felt their will to create wither as the horrors mounted, so the final collage is, in many ways, a compromised work in progress.

Its incomplete passages are like a slap in the face of a complacent audience and a reminder. But they are also whispered laments. Take the metatextual "Sorry, Cinema," about Ahmed Hassouna, whose passion for the moving image died as death became a close acquaintance. After a life dedicated to filming and documenting life in Gaza, the lack of positive change is like a weight bearing down on the soul, crushing it and the artistic impulse along with it. But then, you'll see another stab at autofiction from another artist, a comedian this time. Rather than throwing in the towel, he brings clownery to the smoking ruins and performs for a limited audience whose reactions vary from polite laughter to honest guffaw. 

From Ground Zero is striking in its mix of immediacy and heterogeneity, running wild with no agreed-upon approach or aesthetic. There's no unifying agent amid its chapters. They're all so different that assessing the film is the equivalent of trying to discern each detail of a monument-sized decoupage. And though there was a round of applause for every short, I won't detail every individual work. Instead, let me share highlights, what stayed with me and keeps reverberating in the imagination weeks after I left Toronto. From one uninterrupted documentary shot to laborious animation, one feels equal amounts of urgency and exhaustion, surges of palpable enthusiasm married to the deepest despair. 

It's the comedian and the documentarian, holding hands in flesh and spirit, in the manifest soul of cinema that this film exemplifies like few others. Some of its best moments go for simplicity, merely tracing the day-to-day doings of the people stuck in Gaza, between a rock and a hard place. A moving sequence is dedicated to the process of taking a shower, while another may pause its human tale to wonder at the cuteness of cats. Other pieces of the quotidian are sobering, like the practice of writing children's names across their arms and legs so that they'll be easy to identify If they're blown to bits. Those same children can be the auteurs of another segment, cutting out colored paper to make a stop-motion lark with an underlying note of solemnity.

While not organized according to chronology, the From Ground Zero shorts tell a story of their own as a group. The relationship formed in sequence creates clashes and meaning erupts from them, often through contrast, sometimes through complementing points of view. Moreover, there's a sense of growing roughness to the registers chosen, as if the film were disintegrating as it unrolls its moving mural. By the time we reach a sort of puppet theater and the camera pulls back to reveal the "studio" of its creation, a stage amid the broken pieces of what may have once been a home, it's difficult not to succumb to despondency. But maybe fury is more productive.

Yet, that's not the sole point or purpose of the shapeshifting exercise, as its flashes of hope and humanity remind us – from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.

As one would expect, No Other Land and From Ground Zero are struggling to find distributors. However, they'll likely enjoy qualifying releases before the year is over. In No Other Land's case, it'll also play at the NYFF, which starts today.