By Garry Maddox
NO OTHER LAND
Rating MA, 95 minutes
Limited cinemas from Thursday
★★★½
There is a moment late in this documentary about Palestinian resistance to Israel forcibly expelling villagers from farming land in the West Bank that is like a modern Waiting for Godot.
Basel Adra, left, and Yuval Abraham in No Other Land.Credit: Hi Gloss Entertainment
Two activists and journalists who have become friends – an Israeli and a Palestinian – are smoking late at night and talking about what it’s still possible to achieve in a brutal conflict.
“What can we do?” says Israeli Yuval Abraham, who has been chronicling clashes between the Israeli military and Palestinian residents in videos that only have a brief impact before they are forgotten.
“I hope we’ll change this bad reality,” says Palestinian Basel Adra, who has dedicated years to trying to stop the bulldozing of homes. “I hope.”
That hope has been hard to keep alive throughout Adra’s life.
No Other Land, made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists, starts with Adra recounting that his first memory at the age of five is his activist father being arrested. At seven, he remembers watching his father joining other residents of Masafer Yatta, a community of about 20 small farming villages in the West Bank mountains, at a protest.
Since a favourable decision by the Israel Supreme Court in 2022, the country’s military has been aggressively moving these residents to establish a tank training ground. One news broadcast describes it as one of the single biggest expulsion decisions since the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories began in 1967.
Adra’s shattering videos show residents being herded away and their homes bulldozed. Some go to live in caves. Others give up farming and move into the city. It’s a pro-Palestinian documentary full of distressing scenes, including a soldier shooting a protester, Harun Abu Aram, who becomes paralysed below the neck. He leaves hospital to live in what his mother calls a dirty cave and is carried around in a blanket by his family. Adra, who has a law degree, is increasingly exhausted by the struggle.
A child plays near a home that has been demolished in No Other Land.Credit: Hi Gloss Entertainment
Then, just as the documentary was being finished last year, the Hamas-led attack on October 7 killed more than 1200 Israelis and sparked war in Gaza and Lebanon.
The last horrific video filmed by Adra, which is a coda to the film, shows the struggle by farmers to stay on their land becoming even more violent.
So powerful that it won both best documentary and an audience award at the Berlin Film Festival, No Other Land presents an idealistic vision of young Israelis and Palestinians working together for justice and peace.
But since October 7, that idealism seems to belong to a past era.
Tragically, a long struggle over a pocket of West Bank land has been overshadowed by the shocking death toll of a war that has lasted 13 months so far.
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