Still from the film Photo: Yabayay Media Still from the film Photo: Yabayay Media

At the 2025 Academy Awards, No Other Land won the award for the Best Documentary Feature.

No Other Land carries a deep friendship at its heart-one between Palestinian resident Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. It is through their relationship, weathering unspeakable devastation and cross-border roots, we are hurtled into the horror of Palestine under Israeli occupation. We observe Basel’s home in Masafer Yatta in southern West Bank, a cluster of twenty villages housing a thousand Palestinians rendered vulnerable by the Israeli occupation. Yuval had first dropped by to do a story on the endangered community, but found himself returning to persistently document it alongside Basel. Over the years since his first visit, Yuval has been a near-constant companion. Theirs is a shared faith in the Palestinian restitution. They can also share a laugh amidst the grimmest moments, after pulling off a risky clean-shave encounter with the army. 

In terms of information, Basel and Yuval don’t share extraordinary revelations. We know bits and parts, the shape of this conflict. What No Other Land does is lay it out in direct, unambiguous terms. Splits exist on all counts, even the question of mobility. Every night, Yuval drives back to his home whereas Palestinians are robbed of freedom to navigate their own village. Increasingly, more areas become cordoned off, assigned off-limits by the Israeli army standing sentry. The semiotics of distinguishing between the two nationalities is immediate, inescapable. Basel highlights them through colors: yellow for Israeli cars, green for Palestinian.

Still from the film Photo: Antipode Films Still from the film Photo: Antipode Films

Co-directed by the two friends along with Hamdan Balla and Rachel Szor, there’s no room the film allows for equivocations or moral confusion. The demands of the village are simple, as basic as wanting to hold onto one’s land. Over a five-year span, between 2019 and 2023, Basel records the crushing advance of the army. We witness escalating hostilities till the October of 2023, before the Hamas attack which spurred the most large-scale Israeli offensive in Gaza. No Other Land alternates between shaky phone footage, striking a guerrilla note to the proceedings, and conventional approaches to scuffles between Palestinians and Israeli security personnel. Yuval is by his side through much of the progressively worsening circumstances, joining him as Basel leads protests.

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But the Israeli brute force is relentless, chipping away at all the resilience Palestinians can muster. “They destroy us slowly,” Basel remarks,” every week, a home”. Nights are spent secretly rebuilding even as the air is thick with anxiety over a sudden encroachment. Water pipes are destroyed. The army disposes of the villagers’ building equipment. No mercy is shown to even the women,fef777 casino the old or children. The courts (Israeli) decree the Palestinian expulsions, stating them as “illegal invaders” on land that needs to be used for military training. But, as Basel himself points out, Masafer Yatta has been on Palestine’s maps going back as far as the 19th century.

Still from the film Photo: Antipode Films Still from the film Photo: Antipode Films

Yuval wonders how he can possibly keep up his hope and power. Basel admits at times he can’t resist a “huge depression” within him. The film names the occupation, invoking the decades of push-pull preceding the death’s knell of the Israeli court ruling. Basel comes from a family of activists. His father has been arrested multiple times, his mother more cautious. There’s so much loss to contend with, chances families may be ripped apart at any time. It’s a situation of constant vulnerability. There’s not a moment of rest but a swathe of stress everyone in the village is locked in. Whatever they scrap together, demolition stares them soon in the face.

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Only one choice hovers: “endure, or leave your land”. Palestinians are railroaded towards steady erasure, rehoused in the city in tiny flats. Most of Masafer Yatta refuses to cave in, huddling in caves as their makeshift homes. The bulldozer looms at all times, equally does Basel’s spirit of documenting everything, the intimidation, threats of violence, ultimate bloody eruptions. Since his childhood, Basel has witnessed the occupation tightening as well as the daily pushback by his community. Surrendering to despair is not an option. “How can they expect us to forget our land?”, the villagers emphasize.

But the friendship between Basel and Yuval too has to bear the strain imposed by national difference. Ideologically, they occupy the same wavelength, bound by a philosophy of fairness and justice. Yet, disaffection and disappointment can’t help but creep in. Yuval is popular and beloved in the village, his stance clearly legible to them, but he’s occasionally advised to stay away. Hurt, resentment and anger of Palestinians may rebound instead in his direction. As passionately empathetic as he is, Yuval isn’t experiencing the uprooting of his own home. Some measure of a chasm, hence, does exist. Basel studied law but the economy is in such tatters there are barely any job opportunities; all he can do is manage his father’s gas station. We witness the friendship both in active allyship on the field, shoulder-to-shoulder in the eye of danger, as well as moments of being utterly lost, rudderless.

Yuval complains about his articles not getting ample viewership. It’s nothing new to Basel. He’s been at it for years. “You want it all fast,” he gently chides Yuval,” Get used to failing”. This eventually corrals into the central thesis No Other Land puts forth. There may be intermittent sparks of sympathy shown from few corners. It comes and goes. But how to channel them towards real change?

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