No Other Land (2024)
★★★½ — No Other Land (2024)
No Other Land (2024) is a documentary produced under the co-production arrangement between Norwegian outfit Antipode Films and Palestinian company Yabayay Media. The film runs 92 minutes and arrives with an unusual distinction: it was made collectively by a group of four filmmakers, two Palestinian and two Israeli, working under genuinely difficult and often dangerous conditions in the occupied West Bank. The subject is the Masafer Yatta region of the southern West Bank, where a long-running legal and military campaign to displace Palestinian communities has continued for decades. The film had its world premiere at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024, where it won the Documentary Award. Its release into wider distribution generated considerable attention and no small amount of controversy, particularly in the United States, where it took some time to find a distributor willing to pick it up. For a documentary made on limited resources by people filming in a conflict zone, the level of international interest it attracted says something about the material it contains.
The four co-directors are Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist and builder from Masafer Yatta; Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist; Hamdan Ballal, a Palestinian filmmaker; and Rachel Szor, an Israeli cinematographer. This is not, in other words, a film commissioned by a broadcaster and handed to a professional documentary crew from the outside. The footage was gathered over several years by people who were either living the story or covering it from close proximity. That distinction matters. Where many conflict documentaries, however well intentioned, work from a position of relative safety and editorial distance, No Other Land is made by people with direct personal stakes in what the camera is recording. Adra, who is one of the film's subjects as much as one of its makers, has spent much of his life documenting demolitions and displacement in his own community. The collaboration between him and Abraham, who have spoken publicly about the personal and professional friendship that developed during the making of the film, gives the project a dimension that a more conventional documentary approach would struggle to replicate. For a sense of what Norwegian co-production can look like in a very different register, it is worth noting that the country's output ranges considerably, from the likes of The Worst Person in the World to the present film, which shares precisely nothing in mood or subject matter but reflects the same willingness to support challenging, distinctive work.
The cast, if that word even feels quite right for a documentary of this kind, centres on Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham as the two figures whose relationship gives the film much of its human architecture. Alongside them, community members including Farisa Abu Aram, Nasser Adra and Harun Abu Aram appear as themselves, their lives forming the substance of what the film records. There are no actors here, no performances shaped in post-production to smooth the edges. If you are familiar with documentary filmmaking that operates in this vein, close to its subjects and unwilling to aestheticise what it sees, films like Nom Tèw or the stripped-back directness of Next Goal Wins offer some point of comparison in terms of approach, though the political weight here is of a different order entirely.
A-Z World Movie Tour Palestine No Other Land is not just a documentary, it’s a moral imperative. Co-directed by Palestinian builder Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, this film is raw, urgent, and devastating in its simplicity. It documents the ongoing forced displacement of Palestinian communities in the occupied West Bank, particularly Masafer Yatta, where families live under constant threat of home demolitions, land seizures, and military violence. What makes it so powerful is its intimacy: this isn’t a detached exposé, but a first-hand account from someone fighting for his home, his history, and his right to exist. The footage is often harrowing. Homes are reduced to rubble in minutes, children playing among the debris, families packing their lives into cars with nowhere to go. There are no dramatic re-enactments, no omniscient narrator telling us how to feel. Just quiet observation, personal testimony, and the unbearable weight of injustice repeating itself, year after year. The friendship between Adra and Abraham (a Palestinian and an Israeli standing together) becomes its own quiet act of resistance in a world that demands sides. It’s an extremely hard watch. Not because it’s graphic in a sensational way, but because of its relentless, grinding truth. The sheer ordinariness of the oppression (the bureaucratic cruelty, the arbitrary raids, the slow erasure of a people) is what makes it so unbearable. And the most crushing part? Knowing that, as you watch, it’s still happening. No resolution. No end in sight. This isn’t just an important documentary, it’s essential. A film that refuses to look away, and demands the same from us. Not because it offers answers, but because it forces the question: how is this still allowed?
I find myself still thinking about the footage days after watching, which is usually the clearest sign for me that a documentary has done something a polished but unremarkable film never manages. The fact that this was made at all, by the people who made it, in the circumstances they were in, is worth sitting with on its own. But it goes well beyond the circumstances of its production. It asks you to pay attention, and then it refuses to let you file the whole thing away under "important film, watched it, moving on." That refusal is the point. Some films entertain, some inform, and occasionally one comes along that just holds a mirror up and waits. This is one of those.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2024 | Watched: 2025-08-10
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for No Other Land (2024) on YouTube
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