Berlinale
Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra accept the Berlinale Documentary Award for their film "No Other Land," February 2024.
No Other Land is the non-fiction film of the moment: In the past month, Basel Adra’s and Yuval Abraham’s West Bank-centered documentary has garnered a number of prestigious awards, including the European Film Academy Documentary Award (Prix Arte), the Gotham Independent Film Award for Best Documentary Feature, the New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Non-Fiction Film, and the IDFA NPO Doc Audience Award. But at its February premiere at the Berlinale, where the film won the award for best documentary, audience reception was more ambivalent, owing in part to the filmmakers’ denunciation of Israel in their acceptance speech.
“I am Israeli,” Abraham said. “Basel is Palestinian, and in two days, we will go back to a land where we are not equal. I am living under civilian law and Basel is under military law. We live thirty minutes from one another, but I have voting rights and Basel does not have voting rights. I am free to move where I want in this land. Basel is—like millions of Palestinians—locked in the occupied West Bank. The situation of apartheid between us, this inequality, has to end.”
Filmed over a four-year period between 2019 and 2023, No Other Land documents the lengths to which both Israeli soldiers and settlers have gone to evict Palestinian communities from the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta region. A significant portion of the documentary consists of footage shot by its protagonist and co-director, Basel Adra. Born and raised in Masafer Yatta, Adra started out as a citizen journalist, documenting the demolitions and resulting confrontations for social media. Along the way, he crossed paths with Yuval Abraham, an Israeli reporter whose views on the occupation changed when he learned Arabic to reconnect with his Yemeni grandparents. “It felt like living with one eye closed,” he told his audience after the Carré screening. “The dissonance between what I’d read about the subject in Hebrew, and what I ended up witnessing in Masafer Yatta, was profound.” The film is as much about Adra and Abraham’s friendship as the conflict in the West Bank, and, as the duo has expressed repeatedly, their bond cannot be separated from the circumstances in which it formed.
No Other Land appears to confirm what activists across the world already have been describing, but the vast majority of their elected officials deny: What is happening in and around the West Bank is a systematic effort to dehumanize and eradicate a people and their culture. Families stand by as caravans of bulldozers come to demolish their homes, cut off their water supply, and fill up their wells with vats of cement, making the already barren environment even more inhospitable. Unarmed men, women, and elderly people face off against heavily armed Israel Defense Forces who hide behind masks or sunglasses, who respond to their confrontational questions (“Why are you doing this?” “How can you live with yourself?”) with orders and threats. In what is perhaps the most upsetting scene of the entire film, an Israeli settler shoots one of Adra’s relatives point blank in the stomach, taking cover as the latter collapses onto the ground.
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Still from "No Other Land."
Although the filmmakers were met with a standing ovation at the Berlinale, celebration quickly gave way to criticism. Berlin’s mayor, Kai Wegner of the center-right Christian Democratic Union of Germany, referred to the Berlinale’s closing ceremony as an “intolerable relativization” of the occupation. Wegner repeated the oft-repeated conservative talking point that “full responsibility for the deep suffering in Israel and the Gaza Strip lies with Hamas,” rather than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, whose army has targeted hospitals and humanitarian relief efforts.
Wegner and others blamed Germany’s federal commissioner for culture and media, Claudia Roth, for giving No Other Land such a prominent platform at the festival. Roth, who attended the Berlinale premiere and joined in the standing ovation that followed, later retracted her praise for the film, calling it “shockingly one-sided and characterized by deep hatred of Israel.” She also clarified that, although she did indeed applaud the filmmakers, her applause was directed only to the “Jewish-Israeli journalist,” not his Palestinian associate.
Meanwhile, the Berlin city website, Berlin.de, described No Other Land as “exhibiting antisemitic tendencies” on a page dedicated to the Berlinale and its selections. In response, Abraham, who is a descendant of Holocaust survivors, wrote on X that he feels “unsafe and unwelcome in Berlin in 2024 as a left-wing Israeli and will take legal action.”
The documentary’s mixed reception at the Berlinale reflects Germany’s unshaking, almost pathological loyalty to Netanyahu and the state of Israel—a loyalty linked, as commentators like Al Jazeera’s Tony Greenstein have argued, to the country’s persisting desire to atone for the sins of the Holocaust. It’s an easy-to-grasp explanation, but also an inherently unsatisfying one, as any genuine confrontation with the legacy of the Holocaust would surely compel German society to prevent Israel’s current government from committing a genocide of its own. In a sense, Germany’s “special relationship” with Israel is not an expression of its historical guilt so much as its continued unwillingness to assume full responsibility for its past.
Throughout the film, Abraham suggests that his commitment to documenting events in the West Bank, which has earned him many death threats, is not a betrayal of his Jewish heritage, but rather an affirmation. As the descendant of Holocaust survivors, he understands his duty is to prevent crimes against humanity, rather than enable or ignore them.
Technically, Roth was right to call No Other Land “one-sided.” The documentary does not provide an objective, bird’s-eye view of the conflict that tells both sides of the story. Instead, it’s told almost exclusively from the Palestinian perspective, giving readers an impression of what the average resident of the West Bank has gone through and still goes through. But that doesn’t make the film any less worthy of being seen. Quite the opposite, actually.
For most of the film’s arduous production, Adra was propelled by the idea of using his camera as a political weapon—to raise awareness of and sympathy for the Palestinian cause, and in so doing, draw the conflict to a close. But over the course of No Other Land, we see his optimism slowly dissipate. Today, as the war escalates, Netanyahu continues to receive support from Israel’s European and American allies—and some of those allies write off Adra and Abraham’s work as antisemitic. The prevailing mood during the film’s screening at Carré, and the Q&A that followed, was one of despair. A minutes-long standing ovation, followed by chants of “From the river to the sea,” reminded the filmmakers that they are not alone. But while their audience is with them, they have yet to win over the politicians capable of making a real, immediate difference, and they clearly doubt they ever will.