‘No Other Land’ Becomes Political Lightning Rod After Oscar Best Doc Win

Thanks to its victory at the Oscars and a passionate acceptance speech from its filmmakers, the searing documentary “No Other Land” has drawn more attention than ever both to itself and to the ongoing crisis between Palestinians and Israelis in the West Bank.

And that has made it a political lightning rod that has drawn criticism from Israel and, perhaps unexpectedly, from some pro-Palestinian activist organizations.

Filmed from 2019 to just days after the Hamas attacks on Oct. 7, 2023, “No Other Land” documents the destruction of Palestinian homes in Masafer Yatta, a collection of West Bank hamlets which was declared a “closed military training zone” in 1980 and which in recent years has been targeted by Israeli military and settlers.

The film focuses on Palestinian co-director Basel Adra’s efforts to document the destruction, as well as his relationship with Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham, who enjoys a far greater degree of freedom than Adra. At the Oscars, Abraham highlighted this difference.

“We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws that destroy his life,” Abraham said.

“About two months ago, I became a father, and my hope to my daughter is that she will not have to live the same life I am living now, always fearing violence, home demolitions, and forced displacement that my community, Masafer Yatta, is facing every day,” Adra said in his own speech.

The response from Israeli officials to the film was swift condemnation, with culture minister Miki Zohar calling it it a “sad moment for the world of cinema” and calling for the film’s boycott.

“Instead of presenting the complexity of Israeli reality, the filmmakers chose to amplify narratives that distort Israel’s image vis-à-vis international audiences. Freedom of expression is an important value, but turning the defamation of Israel into a tool for international promotion is not art—it is sabotage against the State of Israel, especially in the wake of the October 7th massacre and the ongoing war,” Zohar said in a statement posted on social media.

Meanwhile more than 100 Israeli filmmakers pushed back this week against the call not to screen the film, saying in a joint letter that they “are opposed to the attempts at silencing and incitement on the part of the culture minister and other officials, and call on the public to watch the film and to judge it independently.”

Israel Bachar, consul general to Israel in Los Angeles, had sharper words against the film in his social media response: “If Hollywood is eager to see the truth, I suggest they binge watch the countless hours of footage Palestinians themselves recorded—slaughtering entire families, kidnapping the elderly and infants, and committing every crime against humanity. That is the real documentary!”

But a different angle of criticism came on Wednesday from the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI), also known as the BDS (Boycott Divest and Sanction) movement, which called to boycott the film, saying said it violates its principles of “anti-normalization,” which calls for any project or initiative that brings Israelis and Palestinians on the same platform to “publicly recognize the UN-affirmed inalienable rights of the Palestinian people” and “must constitute a form of co-resistance against the Israeli regime of occupation, settler-colonialism, and apartheid.”

In a statement posted on the BDS Movement website, PACBI claimed that some of the Israeli members of the “No Other Land” team “failed to acknowledge that Israel is perpetrating a genocide.”

In an update to that post, PACBI acknowledged that the filmmakers had sent out an updated version of their statement on the film’s website which says that the film “is not only proof of Israeli settler-colonial war crimes taking place in the present, but also a proposal for the future, a search for a path towards justice and equality.”

Of course, “No Other Land” also has earned praise and defense since its Oscar win. In a guest column for TheWrap, Palestinian-American writer Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib hailed the film as “part of a broader trajectory of a shift in global public opinion to acknowledge the plight of Palestinians and push for their cause to be front and center in the western world.”

Alkhatib also dismissed the criticisms leveled at the film on both pro-Israel and anti-normalization grounds, saying the former comes in part from “a fair amount of bigotry” while the latter is “reductionist.”

“There is a fervent attitude that anything Israeli automatically means colonizer and oppressor even when it entails expressions of allyship and solidarity and even when Israeli partners help elevate otherwise neglected and overlooked Palestinian stories,” he wrote.

And beyond the internet discourse, there’s no doubt that the Oscars have elevated global awareness of “No Other Land,” which is the first documentary to win an Oscar without a U.S. distributor. As of Oscar Sunday, the film had grossed approximately $600,000 from 80 screens and is set to expand to 120 this weekend as part of its self-distributed theatrical run. The film also made its network television premiere in the United Kingdom on Channel 4 this past Tuesday.

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