A Palestinian-Israeli collective made one of 2024's most lauded docs. Will it be released in the U.S.?

Palestinian Basel Adra, right, and Israeli Yuval Abraham receive the documentary award for "No Other Land" at the International Film Festival, Berlinale, in Berlin, Saturday, Feb. 24, 2024. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber)

Basel Adra, a Palestinian, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli, spent five years making a movie that depicts daily life in Adra’s village under Israeli occupation. The resulting film, “No Other Land,” has been hailed as one of the year's most powerful documentaries, winning prizes at international film festivals.

It’s also stoked controversy, prompted death threats for its makers and — despite the acclaim — remains without an American distributor.

Opening this week in France and next week in the United Kingdom, the feature-length documentary has already sold in many international territories. Its status as an Academy Awards contender remains intact — after hosting it during the New York Film Festival, the Lincoln Center will screen the film for a one-week, Oscar-qualifying run beginning Friday. But the filmmakers believe the monthslong inability to find a U.S. distributor boils down to political reasons, with Election Day in the presidential contest between Democratic nominee Kamala Harris and Republican nominee Donald Trump looming.

“Maybe they’re afraid to be defunded if Trump wins,” says Abraham, speaking in an interview from Paris alongside Adra. “But Basel risked his life for years since he was a young boy to film this material. That requires a lot of courage. Can we not have one distributor with the courage, OK, to take a certain risk, but to distribute such an acclaimed and such an important documentary?”

“No Other Land” began long before the current chapter of the war in Gaza. It’s told largely from the perspective of Adra, who was born in Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in the occupied West Bank.

The area, a rugged mountainous region south of Hebron, has for decades been a site of protest against the Israeli government, which ordered Palestinians off the land to make room for a military training ground.

In 1980, the Israeli military declared Masafer Yatta a closed “firing zone." Israeli authorities said the residents — Arab Bedouin who practice a traditional form of agriculture and animal herding and have lived on the land since before 1967 — only used the area part of the year and had no permanent structures there at the time.

Adra was born into this; his father was an activist on behalf of the community and Adra was five when his mother first took him to a demonstration.

Following a 2022 court decision, the army set up checkpoints and regularly demolished community structures — including a school. A camera, Adra says, “became the only tool beside our steadfastness.” He captured the regular demolitions of homes, the violent encounters with Israeli settlers and the ongoing effect the struggle has had on the villagers.

“I started filming when we started to end,” he says in the film, which takes place between 2019 and 2023.

It’s a long-term, on-the-ground portrait of the realities of life under Israeli military law. Families are uprooted. Children grow up in poverty. People die. But its makers never envisioned how much worse things could get.

Made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective (the other two directors are Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor), “No Other Land” wrapped shooting last October, just as the Hamas attack occurred and Israel’s war in Gaza began.

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas militants killed over 1,200 people across southern Israel, taking some 250 people hostage. Israel's retaliatory offensive on Gaza has killed more than 43,000 Palestinians, over half of whom are women and children, say Palestinian health officials who do not distinguish between civilians and combatants. In the West Bank, frequent Israeli raids into Palestinian cities and towns, as well as mounting violence from Jewish settlers, have driven up the death toll since Oct. 7 to more than 760 killed.

“I look at the news just over the past few days. Hundreds of people in Gaza being killed, Israeli hostages dying, massacres happening every day, nonstop,” says Abraham, a Jewish journalist from southern Israel. “And we’re here showing a film in air-conditioned cinemas. There’s a big dissonance in participating in festivals when nothing is festive and everything is becoming worse.”

The war in Gaza — and now the war in Lebanon and the specter of one with Iran — has inevitably altered the landscape for “No Other Land,” a film that marries documentary filmmaking and activism to put a human face to Palestinian suffering. It's won awards in Berlin, Switzerland, Vancouver and South Korea. But for Adra, little of that matters.

“We made this movie to not lose Masafer Yatta, to not lose our homes,” says Adra. “It’s very successful for the movie, but when I go back to the reality, it’s changing for the worse. So there’s this conflict on my mind. The movie is succeeding and has publicity, people want to watch it, but it’s not helping what’s happening on the ground. It doesn’t change anything.”

“No Other Land” was enmeshed in controversy soon after its February debut at the Berlin Film Festival. While accepting the documentary award, Adra spoke about the difficulty of doing so “when there are tens of thousands of my people being slaughtered and massacred by Israel in Gaza.” Abraham called for an end to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories.

In Germany, where anti-Israel statements have acute sensitivity, numerous politicians criticized the filmmakers for making no mention of Israeli victims or Hamas. Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture minister, said the speeches were “shockingly one-sided.” Kai Wegner, mayor of Berlin, called them “intolerable relativization.” Ron Prosor, Israel’s ambassador to Germany, called it “blatant antisemitic discourse.”

Abraham, who says he received death threats, was “enraged” by the response. As a descendent of Holocaust victims, he believes labeling criticism of Israeli policies as antisemitic empties the phrase of meaning.

“We called for equality between Palestinians and Israelis. We called for an end to the occupation. We spoke about what we see as the political roots of the violence that exists in our land. To me, this the most important message that there can be,” says Abraham. “It feels like we’re living in the ‘1984’ novel where you make these kinds of statements and that’s somehow labeled as controversial.”

Adra and Abraham's relationship, one they hope can stand for Israeli-Palestinian coexistence, is a central component of “No Other Land.”

Together, they rush to document the arrival of tanks or military bulldozers; they lament the little attention their social media posts or articles find online; they ponder their futures.

But there is also tension in their differences. One lives under civilian law, the other under military law. Whether Adra will be able to pass through checkpoints to travel abroad is always in question. In the film, their Palestinian co-director, Ballal, is seen skeptically questioning Abraham’s place in the struggle.

“It could be your brother or friend who destroyed my home,” Ballal tells him.

“As an Israeli, I believe that the status quo is harmful for Israelis for the simple fact that security in the land is mutual,” Abraham tells The Associated Press. “People are dependent on one another. We cannot expect to have security if Palestinians don’t have freedom.”

Even before the war in Gaza, Adra and Abraham struggled to gain international attention for Masafer Yatta.

Now, their cause is dwarfed by the destruction in Gaza, and it’s difficult for them to feel any hope. Days after Oct. 7, Adra’s cousin was shot and killed point blank by a settler, an incident captured in the film. “For me,” says Adra, “there’s nothing clear where this is going.”

In meetings with distributors, the filmmakers say, there's been a lot of interest. “They say they love the film, but then they're hesitant,” says Abraham.

Whether U.S. film distributors have grown too cautious politically was also a prominent question for the Trump drama “The Apprentice,” which only found a home with Briarcliff Entertainment shortly before it was released last month. “Union,” a well-received documentary about labor organization at Amazon, recently resorted to self-distributing its release.

“Once upon a time, American film distributors and exhibitors embraced controversy — especially when it came to acclaimed movies whose controversy was inextricably intertwined with their humanity,” the New York magazine critic Bilge Ebiri wrote of “No Other Land.” “Are these companies holding back out of budgetary reasons, out of cowardice, out of political disagreement?”

“It’s not allowing the conversation even to begin by silencing our voices, the voices of a Palestinian who is resisting the occupation and the voice of an Israeli who is also against occupation and believes in a future of equality and justice for everyone,” Abraham says. “Why are you blocking these kinds of voices from entering the space of mainstream cinema in the U.S.?” (The film also lacks an Israeli distributor.)

However it gets seen, the filmmakers hope “No Other Land” remains a vital document to the current crisis.

“We wanted to send the message that the status quo is very harmful and it should change,” says Adra. “A political solution is needed. That was before Oct. 7. We don’t want to get to a day such as Oct. 7. We want to warn global leaders to take actions and stop being complicit with the occupation.”

“What’s happening is very, very sad and tragic,” he adds. “I never imagined in my lifetime that something like this can happen, and that the world would let it go on.”