Imagine that you live in a village. One where the country next to where you live, suddenly decides it wants to turn the area you are living in into an army training ground. Regularly the army then starts to arrive unannounced with bulldozers to knock down a house or two, barely leaving the inhabitants sufficient time to gather and save their belongings or livestock. You protest, but even the protesters are then attacked by the army, people are shot, some seriously injured or killed, relatives are frequently arrested. And this happens repeatedly, over and over again, like a form of prolonged unending torture. Imagine what effect this would have upon you. Do you resist, stay, rebuild and fight on, or do you give up and leave the land, the place your family has farmed for generations, and move into the city?
No Other Land is an extremely personal film, painful to watch. It shows quite graphically just what ordinary Palestinians have been having to deal with for many decades. The film was shot by Basel a Palestinian and his close Israeli friend Yuval. Though an ally, Yuval also has to deal with distrust and hostility from the people he's trying to help. Even Basel chastises him about how easy it is for Yuval, to walk away, to just drive over the border to the relative safety of his own home. He doesn't have to continue to live here. Documentary footage incorporates 'in time' recordings of these attacks, the villagers reactions, the heartrending pleas for mercy and understanding, their distress and depression afterwards. As Basel and Yuval ponder together quite what needs to happen in order for their films of the situation to get the public attention they need.
There is no way these ordinary people can effectively fight back against the US funded Israeli military. They do what they can but their homeland Masafer Yatta is being robbed from them piece by piece regardless. What is also clear is that the army training ground excuse is just a ruse. What they really want to do is push the Palestinian presence away from near-bye illegal Israeli West Bank settlements, with the longer term intention of expanding them further.
Basel's family have a history of activism and fighting off the encroachment of settlers and demolitions. His Father was arrested a number of times in his hothead youth, until he settled down to man the village's petrol pump. The film mixes film shot in Basel's childhood and contemporary footage. It shows you the time Tony Blair came to see the village school which was under threat of demolition. A week later it was reprieved. However, towards the end of the documentary you see it being bulldozed as the school children watch on. The vindictive cruelty of it was all too apparent. All of the modern footage was filmed between 2018 to 2024, and stops just prior to Hamas's murderous atrocity. And you realise when they say the only place for them to move will be into Gaza, they do not know that Netanyahu's government are about to lay waste to it in a genocidal level of revenge.
No Other Land quite rightly won the 2025 Oscar for Best Documentary Feature. It speaks volumes that the Director of The Brutalist, Brady Corbet had to make a plea at the ceremony for someone to distribute it in the US. Because so far no one will touch it. In the light of The Tangerine Emperor's fickle nature, no one is willing to incur the unforeseeable consequences of his vengeful wrath. That's shocking, but telling, like this important documentary.
CARROT REVIEW - 8/8
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