No Other Land (2024)
★★★½ — No Other Land (2024)
How is this still allowed? That's the question I kept coming back to, sitting with No Other Land long after it finished. Not in an abstract, rhetorical way. In a raw, sickened, what-do-we-do-with-this way. Because this film doesn't let you off the hook. It doesn't give you the comfort of a conclusion, a resolution, or even a flicker of hope on the horizon. It just shows you what's happening, holds the camera steady, and waits for you to reckon with it.
Co-directed by Palestinian builder Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, No Other Land documents the forced displacement of Palestinian communities in Masafer Yatta, in the occupied West Bank. Families living under the constant threat of demolitions, raids, land seizures. Homes reduced to rubble in minutes. Children picking through debris as if it's just another afternoon. The bureaucratic machinery of occupation grinding on, slow and remorseless, while the rest of the world looks elsewhere.
What separates this from so many other conflict documentaries is its intimacy. Adra isn't a visiting journalist parachuting in with a camera and a flight home booked. This is his home. His family. His history being bulldozed. The footage is often shaky, immediate, shot in the moment because there wasn't time to set up properly. And that urgency is exactly what gives it its power. There's no omniscient narrator steering your emotions. No dramatic reconstruction. Just the unbearable, grinding truth of what displacement looks like in practice, over and over again, year after year.
The friendship between Adra and Abraham threads through the film quietly but meaningfully. A Palestinian and an Israeli standing side by side, documenting the same injustice, pushing back against the idea that you must pick a tribe and stick to it. In a climate that demands absolutes, their collaboration is its own kind of defiance. It doesn't resolve the political complexity, and the film is smart enough not to pretend it does. But it models something. A refusal to be enemies when the evidence in front of you demands something more honest.
I won't pretend this is an easy watch. It isn't. But not because it's graphic in a sensational, look-away sense. It's hard because of its relentless ordinariness. The cruelty here isn't operatic. It's administrative. It's a demolition order. A checkpoint. A raid at four in the morning. The sheer repetition of it, the grinding routine of oppression, is what wears you down. And the most crushing detail of all is the one the film can't avoid: as you're watching, it's still happening. There's no past tense. No "and then things got better." Just the present, ongoing and unresolved.
I've been working through an A-Z world movie tour, and Palestine was always going to be a difficult entry to find the right film for. No Other Land is the right film. Not because it's the most polished documentary I've seen, or the most technically accomplished. But because it's the most necessary. It refuses to look away, and it refuses to let you look away either. Four stars, though the star rating feels slightly beside the point here. This is less a film to be rated and more a film to be witnessed.
The question it leaves you with isn't one the film can answer. How is this still allowed? That one's on us.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2025-08-10
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