“What we see on the screen, or in any picture representing the solidity of Palestinians,” writes Edward Said in an essay on Michel Khleifi’s Fertile Memory (1981), the first feature film made in the occupied West Bank, “is only that, a utopian image making possible a connection between Palestinian individuals and Palestinian land.” After Fertile Memory, we can put together a small canon of filmmaking in the West Bank, to which we may include Aqabat jaber: Vie de passage (Eyal Sivan, 1987), Intifada (Jenny Morgan, 1988), Stolen Freedom (David Kandah, 1991), Chronicle of a Disappearance (Elia Suleiman, 1996), Jenin, Jenin (Mohammed Bakri, 2002), Route 181: Fragments of a Journey Through Israel-Palestine (Khleifi and Sivan, 2004), and 5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi, 2013), among others.
No Other Land is the most recent film to enter this canon, and even without distribution in the United States, it might already be the most recognized title. It documents the forceful dispossession of Palestinian land in Masafer Yatta, at the southernmost border of the West Bank, from 2019 to 2023, compiled from footage taken by Palestinian journalist Basel Adra of bulldozers flanked by Israeli soldiers harassing and, in some cases, injuring his family and neighbors. Punctuating the footage are scenes of Adra and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli activist and one of the film’s co-directors, discussing plans with other Palestinians to circulate the footage online. (Rachel Szor and Hamdan Ballal are also credited as co-directors.) At one point, the pair remark that if they document the violence, it will force the United States to pressure Israel to stand down.
A title card at the end of the film informs the audience that the film was completed in October 2023. We should take this date not only as a designation of the timeline of its production, but also of its assumptions of this filmmaking. In each encounter with the IDF soldiers and settlers, filmed largely in first-person by Adra, we hear him plead and reason with them, “What if this was your house, your family?” We learn over the course of the film to associate these images with this call to action. Before the Israeli bombardment of Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon, one was able to hope, however despairingly, that photographing war crimes could produce critique and that one’s assailant would want to keep their crimes hidden. What sorts of images are needed, then, when one’s oppressor takes and distributes images of their crimes themselves, feeling no remorse for their actions? How many hours of footage have Israeli soldiers uploaded of themselves brutalizing Palestinians and ransacking their homes, without fear of penalty or reprimand? How much of the aesthetic theory of modernity, from Francisco Goya to Jacob Riis to Alain Resnais and Abu Ghraib, depends upon a mutually recognized sense of shame? What do images, made politically, look like when they can no longer provoke it? These are the questions I’m left with after seeing No Other Land.
No Other Land screens this afternoon, December 2, at the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the series “Curators’ Choice 2024: The First Batch” and “Infinite Beauty: Muslim and MENASA Identity Onscreen.”
