A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #462 - No other land (2025) by Basel Adra (Palestinian), Yuval Abraham (Israeli), Rachel Szor (Iranian) and Hamdan Ballal (Palestinian). (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

No other land is a documentary (with Swedish co-participation), 
directed, written and edited by an Israeli-Palestinian collective 
consisting of Basel Adra (Palestinian), Yuval Abraham (Israeli), Rachel 
Szor (Iranian) and Hamdan Ballal (Palestinian)... it recounts Israel's 
ethnic cleansing in the Hebron area (West Bank) between 2019 and 2023... 
it shows the occupation by the Israel Defense Forces who, in order to 
build a firing range and a military training area... destroy villages, 
kill people, bury water wells, cut off electricity... Israelis do not 
recognize the existence of the village of Masafer Yatta (which already 
appears on nineteenth-century maps) and keep the community under siege. 
The days are punctuated by an Israeli "expert" who hands Palestinians 
demolition orders for their homes... immediately carried out by 
bulldozers and soldiers who fire on people's protests... we see families 
forced to move, others rebuilding their home at night. In January 2021, 
an Israeli soldier fires into a crowd trying to defend their power 
generator and the young Harun Abu Aram is left paralyzed... it is 
impossible to transport him to a hospital due to the restrictions 
imposed on Palestinians' freedom of movement, and with no house left, 
his mother, Shamia, takes care of him in a cave (he will die two years 
later from his injuries). The brief footage of foreign journalists 
interviewing Shamia and filming her son wrapped in blankets, eyes 
staring toward a stone sky, is moving... one understands the journalists 
are there more out of "duty to report" than to support an immense 
grief... Shamia "pierces" the screen and shows that, even in a 
Palestinian woman/mother's despair, she does not bow her head... she 
manages to convey both the bitterness of poverty and the regal bearing 
of her own story.

Israeli soldiers continue the work of destruction in the Masafer Yatta 
area... they also tear down the only school built by men (at night), 
women and children (by day)... Basel Adra's footage (and archival 
material) shows the ferocity of discrediting, annihilating, pulverizing 
by Israelis, together with the electoral impostures of international 
politics... as when we see Sir Tony Blair strolling for a few minutes 
over the rubble of Masafer Yatta, always in a good light for the 
retriever-dogs of the evening news. Thus Adra: "I've carried a camera 
with me since I was a teenager. I started filming what was happening in 
my village. The reason I began is that I saw only bulldozers entering 
our communities and demolishing our houses. I wanted the world to know 
that we live on this land. That we exist." Adra and his friend, the 
Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, try to spread through the media what 
is happening in those areas... Adra's videos and Abraham's articles do 
not gain great resonance... so they decide to make a documentary and 
give greater visibility to a condition of brutality... meanwhile the 
forced depopulation, the rise of new homes the Israeli government deems 
illegal, settlers pointing rifles at the Palestinian population 
(protected by the army) continue to the funeral song of the bulldozers.

Adra and Yuval receive death threats, and when Yuval speaks on 
television about the Palestinians' dramatic situation in Masafer Yatta, 
he is accused of fueling antisemitism against Israel... the military try 
to arrest Adra but he manages to flee, so they imprison his father, also 
a human-rights activist (Adra takes his place at a humble gas station to 
support the family). The film closes with an intertitle noting that the 
work was completed before Hamas's attacks on Israel (7 October 2023), 
and in a rather emotional sequence we see the settlers' assault (13 
October 2023) in which one of them shoots point-blank a cousin of Basel, 
Zakriha Adra, who is unarmed. Meanwhile, the forced exodus of 
Palestinian families has intensified, and Israeli bulldozers, rifles and 
tanks continue to violate their land.

No other land is a full-fledged indictment of the Israeli government's 
genocidal policy... from a certain, more submerged angle, to be sure... 
the Palestinian National Authority does not come off well either... 
people in the areas around Masafer Yatta seem abandoned to a fate of 
oppression without remedy. When barbarism prevails, fanaticism's 
ferocity turns against human beings, burns the past and sweeps away the 
art of rejoicing... the dictatorship of profit and possession rules 
every field of knowledge and behavior... the powerful rummage like pigs 
in the dungheap of glory and prepare mass graves for the disenchanted... 
contempt for social justice oozes from phantasmagoric peace tables where 
the world's biggest arms-producing/-trading nations sit... and poets' 
fables announce the ill-omened days of wars that impose new slaveries, 
new miseries, new scourges. No other land has garnered significant 
recognition... at the 74th Berlin Film Festival it won Best Documentary 
and the Panorama Audience Award, and then prizes at IDFA Amsterdam, 
Vancouver Int'l Film Festival, CPH:DOX Copenhagen, Visions du Réel Nyon, 
EFA - European Film Award 2024 as Best Documentary and Best Film, 
culminating in the 2025 Oscar for Best Documentary... when Adra and 
Abraham accepted the prize at the 2024 Berlinale, Adra said: "My 
community, my family have filmed the erasure of our society at the hands 
of this brutal occupation. I am here celebrating this award, but it is 
very hard for me while tens of thousands of people are being slaughtered 
and massacred by Israel in Gaza. Masafer Yatta, my community, is being 
leveled by Israeli bulldozers. I ask only one thing: that Germany, since 
I am here in Berlin, respect the UN's will and stop sending weapons to 
Israel." For including No other land at the Berlin Festival, some 
politicians/administrators demanded the removal of the artistic 
director, Carlo Chatrian, a fine connoisseur of auteur cinema. The Oscar 
awarded to the Palestinian film also sparked controversies and public 
debate... in both Europe and America the accusations of antisemitic 
propaganda, defamation, distortion of facts, poisonous hatred toward 
Israel... were insistent... officials and men of letters called for the 
heads of those responsible for accepting and awarding the documentary at 
various festivals... nevertheless, the film continued to reap 
cultural/political interest wherever it was shown and grossed nearly $4 
million... just under one million in Italy alone. Israel's culture 
minister, Miki Zohar, urged all Israeli cinemas not to screen No other 
land. U.S. exhibitors did not buy the film (apart from some 
independents)... as we know, the Jewish clique behind Hollywood's golden 
statuettes is not stingy with honors when it comes to films where the 
ghost of Zionism haunts the world's screens.

History is written by the victors, but sometimes poetry, literature, 
photography, cinema write the history of the victims in a universal 
language that manages to "touch" the bodies of those condemned to 
catastrophe, recognize a people's affliction and wounds, and access 
another humanity. No other land bears witness to the shattered memory of 
a community rising up against the indifference, imperturbability, and 
insensitivity of societies of ruthless calculation... in which human 
value is reduced to that of a slave, not even elegantly dressed... it is 
a documentary shot in the field with makeshift or amateur cameras... one 
does not look much to the preciousness of photography or the perfection 
of framing when rifles replace demands for freedom... authors and 
characters play themselves and give voice and face to those who have 
lost the right to speak, to live, to dream... in a tight, at times epic, 
edit we see Palestinians' peaceful protests against demolitions, 
repelled with violence by the Israeli army and settlers... human-rights 
organizations are labeled by Zionists as terrorist groups... the silence 
of the United States and Europe over the massacres of Palestinians cries 
out in shame... every form of resistance is repressed in the blood of 
men, women and children who fight to reclaim their existence... it is 
not a question of what the Palestinians have done but of what the entire 
world has not done to defend an entire people's right to life.

Bertelli

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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