Alex Heeney reviews the documentary No Other Land, one of the highlights of the Visions du Réel Festival. (It also screened the Berlinale.)
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Collaboratively made with multiple directors, the powerful, urgent, and incisive No Other Land serves as an excellent introduction to the Israeli settler-colonial state in Palestine. Shot over several years, the film follows the budding friendship between Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who is covering the conflict, and Palestinian citizen journalist Basel Adra, who has been documenting the evictions and demolitions of the houses in his community. As such, the film is also a story of allyship: the learning process required for the more privileged person who wants immediate change and the oppressed person’s hardened, more realistic perspective.
Featuring independently shot footage from each filmmaker, No Other Land practices what it preaches. Handheld footage from Adra documents the violent military action in his community as it happens. Cinematographer Rachel Szor’s more formal camerawork documents the tentative friendship between Adra and Abraham. All of this is mixed with archival footage, news footage, and beyond to craft a story of the injustices in Palestine told from multiple perspectives.
Allyship and multiple perspectives in No Other Land
That said, the film never gives space to extremist perspectives. Hamas is virtually out of the picture, not even present as a menace to other Palestinians. Fiercely Zionist Israelis and Israeli settlers get no air time. Instead, Adra takes centre stage, while Abraham serves as an audience surrogate because we, like him, are learning about the exhaustion from years – decades – of fighting this battle and losing.
Early in the film, Yuval complains to Basel that his article isn’t getting enough clicks; Basel chastens him by reminding him that, though his enthusiasm is appreciated, they’ve been fighting this fight for decades, and change takes time. Set over multiple years, as more and more evictions and demolitions happen in Basel’s community, we start to understand what he means. It’s not just one horror but the repeated, ongoing horrors with no end in sight.
The panoply of perspectives in No Other Land is its greatest strength and weakness. The multiple perspectives tell a comprehensive story about the situation. But tracking who shot what and whose perspective we see at any given time can be challenging. Eventually, you can spot some of the messy videos that only Basel could have shot. None of this detracts too much from the immense achievement of No Other Land. Its innovative form and production process mean it will stumble here and there, as all films that break the rules do.
