No Other Land (M)

One of the most important films of the year and winner of both the ‘Best Documentary’ and ‘Audience’ awards at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, No Other Land is a sobering yet inspiring look at Palestinian resistance under occupation.

Basel Adra is a young Palestinian activist and lawyer from Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian villages in the southern West Bank. Since childhood, he has been fighting his community’s mass expulsion — the largest single act of forced displacement ever carried out in the West Bank — by the Israeli occupation. Yuval Abraham, an Israeli investigative journalist, lives a starkly different life to Adra. Striking up an unlikely friendship, the two commit themselves to documenting and protesting the demolition of Palestinian communities in the West Bank. With the help of an Israeli-Palestinian filmmaking collective, they capture the destruction of their land in intimate detail, as the IDF bulldoze everything from homes to schools and playgrounds to even sealing drinking wells.

A front-runner for the Best Documentary Oscar and an Audience Award winner at numerous festivals worldwide, No Other Land is a vital and inspiring testament to the resilience of the Palestinian people.

Directors: Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Rachel Szor

★★★★★ "Eventually in this urgent, despairing film, even the basic human principle of friendship across conflict starts to feel imperilled." FINANCIAL TIMES

★★★★★ "No Other Land, for its many images of despair, still offers a stirring vision for what could be." GUARDIAN

★★★★★ "It’s devastating, but unsurprising, that the seemingly meagre choice to present Palestinians as people, as this documentary does, could be so political." FLICK FEAST

★★★★½ "No Other Land brings humanity and particularity to a topic that is too often discussed in the abstract." EYE FOR FILM

★★★★ "If anything can be described as essential viewing, it’s this stark and unflinching account of life on the ground in a contested region of the West Bank." OBSERVER UK

★★★★ "The film is consistently gripping and harrowing, while including delicate moments of optimism..." TIMES UK

★★★★ "An eye-opening and oft infuriating film about the emotional and mental impact of oppression" THE SKINNY

★★★★ "With a strong narrative and staggeringly intimate camerawork, this documentary gets under the surface of the situation in the Israel-occupied West Bank far more effectively than a news report ever could." SHADOWS ON THE WALL"