A Palestinian-Israeli collective has created one of the most lauded documents of 2024. Will it be released in the US?

NEW YORK (AP) — Basel Adra, a Palestinian, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli, spent five years making a film depicting daily life in the village of Adra under Israeli occupation. The resulting film “There is no other land” was named one of the most influential documentaries of the year, winning prizes at international film festivals.

It also sparked controversy, drawing death threats to its creators and, despite its acclaim, was left without an American distributor.

The feature-length documentary, which premieres this week in France and next week in the UK, has already been sold to many countries around the world. Its status as an Oscar contender remains intact—following its run during the New York Film Festival, Lincoln Center will screen the film for one week starting Friday. But the filmmakers believe the months-long failure to find a U.S. distributor comes down to political reasons, with Election Day in presidential elections between Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and Republican candidate Donald Trump.

“Maybe they are afraid of being left without funding if Trump wins,” Abraham says, speaking from Paris with Adra. “But Basel has risked his life for years since he was a little boy to film this footage. This takes a lot of courage. Can we not have a single distributor who has the courage to take some risks and still distribute such a well-known and such an important documentary?”

“No Other Land” began long before the current chapter war in Gaza. It is mainly told from the point of view of Adra, who was born in Masafer Yatta, a group of villages in the occupied West Bank.

The area, a rugged mountainous region south of Hebron, has for decades been the site of protests against the Israeli government, which ordered Palestinians to leave the land to make room for a military training ground.

In 1980, the Israeli military declared Masafer Yatta a closed “fire zone.” from to 1967 – used this territory only part of the year and at that time did not have permanent buildings there.

Adra was born into this; his father was a community activist, and Adre was 5 years old when his mother first took him to a demonstration.

Following a 2022 court order, the army set up checkpoints and regularly demolished public buildings, including school. The camera, says Adra, “has become the only tool beyond our resilience.” He documented regular demolitions, violent clashes with Israeli settlers and the ongoing impact of the fighting on villagers.

“I started filming when we started to finish,” he says in the film, which takes place between 2019 and 2023.

This is a long-term, real-life portrait of the realities of life under Israeli military law. Families are expelled. Children grow up in poverty. People are dying. But its creators had no idea how much worse the situation could become.

Directed by a Palestinian-Israeli team (the other two directors are Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor), No Other Land wrapped filming last October, as did Hamas attacks happened and Israel’s war in Gaza started.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas militants killed more than 1,200 people in southern Israel and took about 250 hostage. Israel’s retaliatory offensive on the Gaza Strip has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, more than half of them women and children, say Palestinian health officials, who make no distinction between civilians and combatants. In the West Bank, frequent Israeli raids on Palestinian cities and towns and increasing violence by Jewish settlers have pushed the death toll up to more than 760 killed since October 7.

“I only watch the news from the last few days. Hundreds of people in the Gaza Strip are killed, Israeli hostages are dying, massacres are happening every day, without a break,” says Abraham, a Jewish journalist from southern Israel. “And here we are showing the film in air-conditioned theaters. There is a big dissonance in participating in festivals, when there is nothing festive and everything gets worse.”

The war in the Gaza Strip – and now war in Lebanon and the ghost one with Iran — inevitably changed the landscape for No Other Land, a film that combines documentary and activism to put a human face on Palestinian suffering. He has received awards in Berlin, Switzerland, Vancouver and South Korea. But this means little to Adra.

“We made this film so as not to lose Masafer Yatta, not to lose our homes,” says Adra. “It’s very successful for the film, but when I return to reality, it changes for the worse. So I have this conflict on my mind. The film is successful and has publicity, people want to watch it, but that doesn’t help what’s happening on the ground. It doesn’t change anything.”

No Other Land sparked controversy shortly after its February debut at the Berlin Film Festival. Accepting the award for the documentary, Adra spoke of how difficult it is to do this “when tens of thousands of my people are slaughtered and destroyed by Israel in the Gaza Strip.” Abraham called for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories.

In Germany, where anti-Israel messages are sensitive, many politicians criticized the filmmakers for making no mention of Israeli victims or Hamas. Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture minister, said the performances were “shockingly one-sided.” Kai Wegner, the mayor of Berlin, called them “an unbearable relativization.” Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, called it “blatant anti-Semitic discourse.”

Abraham, who says he received death threats, was “furious” at the reaction. As a descendant of Holocaust victims, he believes labeling criticism of Israeli policies as anti-Semitic defeats the purpose of the phrase.

“We called for equality between Palestinians and Israelis. We called for an end to the occupation. We talked about what we see as the political roots of the violence that exists in our land. To me, this is the most important message there can be,” says Abraham. “It feels like we’re living in the novel 1984, where you make statements like that and it’s somehow labeled as controversial.”

Adra and Abraham’s relationship, which they hope can promote Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, is a central component of No Other Land.

Together they rush to document the arrival of tanks or military bulldozers; they complain about the little attention their social media posts or articles receive online; they are thinking about their future.

But there is also tension in their differences. One lives under civil law, the other under military law. Whether Adra will be able to get through checkpoints to travel abroad is always in question. In the film, their Palestinian co-director Ballal skeptically questions Abraham’s place in the struggle.

“It could have been your brother or friend who destroyed my house,” Ballal tells him.

“As an Israeli, I believe that the status quo is harmful to Israelis for the simple reason that security in this land is mutual,” Abraham told The Associated Press. “People depend on each other. We cannot expect security if the Palestinians do not have freedom.”

Even before the Gaza War, Adra and Abraham struggled to bring international attention to Masafer Yatta.

Now, their cause is insignificant destruction in the Gaza Strip, and they find it difficult to feel any hope. A few days after October 7, Adra’s cousin was shot at point-blank range by a settler, an incident depicted in the film. “For me,” says Adra, “there is nothing clear where this will lead.”

According to the filmmakers, meetings with distributors aroused great interest. “They say they like the film, but then they hesitate,” Abraham says.

The question of whether American film distributors have become too politically cautious has also been an important issue for Trump drama “The Apprentice” who just found a home with Briarcliff Entertainment shortly before its release last month. “The Union,” a well-received documentary about labor organizing at Amazon, recently resorted to self-distribution of its release.

“American film distributors and exhibitors were once embroiled in controversy, especially when it came to acclaimed films whose controversy was inextricably linked to their humanity,” New York magazine critic Bilge Ebiri wrote of No Other Land. “Are these companies being held back because of budgetary concerns, cowardice, or political differences?”

“We will not allow the conversation to even begin to silence our voices, the voices of the Palestinians who are resisting the occupation, and the voices of the Israelis who are also against the occupation and believe in a future of equality and justice for all,” Abraham says. . “Why are you blocking such voices from entering the mainstream film space in the US?” (The film also does not have an Israeli distributor.)

However it is seen, the filmmakers hope that No Other Land will remain a vital document in the current crisis.

“We wanted to send a message that the status quo is very harmful and needs to change,” says Adra. “A political solution is needed. This was before October 7th. We don’t want to live to see a day like October 7th. We want to warn world leaders to take action and stop being complicit in the occupation.”

“What’s happening is very, very sad and tragic,” he adds. “I never in my life imagined that something like this could happen and that the world would allow it to continue.”