The urgent documentary by a Palestinian-Israeli collective sees its belated Madison premiere at the Bartell on May 25.

BY DAVID BOFFA, TONE MADISON, MAY 21, 2025

Though it is an international co-production of Palestine and Norway, the Oscar-winningdocumentary No Other Land (2024), co-directed by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor, is particularly damning for American audiences.

The film—finally premiering in Madison at the Bartell Theatre on Sunday, May 25, at 5 and 7 p.m. (the 5 p.m. screening is currently sold out)—centers on the efforts of Basel Adra, a young Palestinian man, and other residents of Masafer Yatta (an area in the occupied West Bank) who are trying to resist their forced removal at the hands of the Israeli military. Early on, in conversation with Abraham (an Israeli journalist and co-director), Adra notes the importance of the American audience when discussing his reasons behind documenting the actions of the Israeli military and settlers: “If we are active and we document on the ground, it will force the United States to pressure Israel. This might stop our expulsion.”

Adra and a partnership of co-directors, a Palestinian-Israeli collective, are no doubt aware of the fact that the atrocities the Israelis are committing are in large part related to American financial, military, and geopolitical support. But beyond our countries’ intertwined politics, the film—intentionally or otherwise—cannot help but draw comparisons to America’s own history of racial violence, both as shown in popular culture and as perpetrated in historical reality. This is not to say that No Other Land should be read or viewed as a statement on America’s racist past—the film is emphatically about centering the hardships and resilience of Palestinians living under occupation. Rather, part of what makes the film so successful and resonant for American viewers is that its exposé of Israeli violence can and should serve as an indictment of those who can recognize historical racism while ignoring contemporary expressions of nearly identical sentiments and viewpoints.

In several chilling scenes, mobs of Israeli settlers and soldiers, armed and often masked, swarm the Palestinians’ land to harass them, throw stones, destroy homes, and shoot at unarmed civilians. The settlers are always accompanied by at least one Israeli soldier (though the soldiers do nothing to stop the settler violence). At least in my viewing experience, masked and armed vigilantes perpetrating racist violence with the tacit if not explicit support of the state immediately calls to mind the actions of the Ku Klux Klan. The sickening glee with which the Israeli settlers take part in their actions, combined with the cowardice of their hiding behind masks, is a potent reminder of the lived reality of this kind of violence in our nation’s history. This isn’t something that just happened in movies; it’s also a continued reality today, still with the enthusiastic support of the American government. 

While outbursts of extreme violence are among the most shocking aspects of No Other Land, the background hum of constant, lower-level violence constantly pervades life under an apartheid system. In one segment, the filmmakers highlight the very different ways that Israelis and Palestinians can move around. Israeli cars have yellow license plates; Palestinian cars have green plates. The former confers freedom, while the latter signifies restricted movement. We see this too with Abraham’s ability to freely enter the West Bank—and to freely leave it. He may be coming to Masafer Yatta in an effort to assist Adra and the area’s other inhabitants in their struggles against the Israeli forces, but as an Israeli, he is also able to leave whenever he likes. Adra and his fellow Palestinians have no choice but to stay in this captive reality. 

The punctuation of insidious daily oppression with outbursts of violence underscores another part of what makes this film so successful as both a document and a documentary: the temporal nature of this experience, which spans not years but decades. Time’s passage makes itself apparent in ways both explicit and implicit. In the former case, title cards indicate the primary years of filming, starting with 2019 and concluding in 2023 (prior to the current Gaza War, a telling detail). In the latter case, the use of old camcorder footage—visually marked by its 4:3 aspect ratio and its formal qualities—emphasizes how this story did not start in 2019, when the filmmaker collective began documenting what would become this project. It has been part of Adra’s experience for his entire life, a point that is highlighted as the film occasionally flips back to the older footage and relates Adra’s father’s own activism in the face of Israeli oppression. At one point Adra very plainly states, “This has been going on for decades.” It stretches back at least to 1948, when the modern state of Israel’s founding forcibly displaced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land. 

Adra’s life coincides with a development that has shifted the narrative, if only slightly: the near-ubiquity of cameras in the hands of Palestinians. Thanks to this technological development, Adra and his peers have been able to document and broadcast the abuses of the Israeli soldiers and settlers. We’ve seen this in the Israeli assault on Gaza, as the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) and government have been forced to make (exceedingly rare) “mea culpas” in light of incontrovertible evidence of human rights abuses and attacks on civilians, journalists, and aid workers. Of course, technology cuts both ways, and Palestinians, perhaps more than any other people, are at the forefront of constant video surveillance by an oppressive state. 

It remains an open question whether the technology that allows for the widespread dissemination of human rights abuses—and the film that results from it—will improve the lives of Palestinians. There is almost nothing we as Americans can do to stop elected officials from sending Israel billions of dollars in weapons that are being used against a civilian population; this is the sad, empirical reality of political agency for the average citizen. But there is more than a little daylight between acknowledging one’s powerlessness and choosing to stay willfully ignorant, or worse. Confronting some of the harsh realities portrayed in No Other Land is not enough, but this collaborative film provides a necessary first step to a moral reckoning that is long overdue.

Author

DAVID BOFFA

David Boffa is a cinephile, filmmaker, and one-time art historian. He’s been happy to call Wisconsin home for over a decade, although he still misses East Coast bagels. There is a very good chance he will ask to pet your dog.

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