“No Other Land”: The Collective Behind the Oscar-Nominated Documentary
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From the online spectacle around Leo XIV's election to our favorite on-screen cardinals. This week on Critics at Large, we're talking all things Pope.
The Catholic Church was made for this moment. I think 2,000 years ago, the Catholic Church basically anticipated TikTok, Instagram, X. You don't have those little Swiss guard outfits and think they're not being photographed. Oil painting is not enough.
I'm Vincent Cunningham. Join me and my co-hosts for an episode on what can only be described as Pope Week. New episodes of Critics at Large drop every Thursday. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.
This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. In a week of astonishing headlines, maybe nothing was more astonishing than Donald Trump's proposal that the United States take over Gaza, ethnically cleanse the region of Palestinians, permanently exiling a population already traumatized by war, and then turn the whole thing into what Trump calls the Riviera of the Middle East. Was this a serious proposal? It certainly put a smile on the face of Benjamin Netanyahu, who's not only intent on obliterating Hamas in Gaza, but at the same time, making Israel's control of the West Bank irreversible. Even if Trump's proposal was merely part of his strategy of flooding the zone, the reality is no less troubling.
And to understand what that reality is, particularly in the West Bank, there's a new documentary film that you should see called No Other Land. In one scene, Palestinians are protesting the demolition of their homes. They're walking down the road carrying balloons and banners. But the protest is banned under Israeli law, and the army is at the ready alongside them with combat gear, rifles, and stun grenades. No Other Land is opening in just a handful of theaters around the country this week. It's been nominated as Best Documentary at the Academy Awards. Two Palestinian and two Israeli filmmakers collaborated to make No Other Land, and I spoke over Zoom with two of them, Basel Adra, who lives in the West Bank, and Yuval Abraham, who lives in Jerusalem. Because so few people have seen this film, I'd like to begin, first of all, this is, first and foremost, begins with Basel's life.
Tell me where you were born, and what was the impulse to make a film about your life and the circumstances of the people all around you. So I was born in a small community in the southern occupied West Bank, Masaf Riata, in my little small village called Al-Dwani. I was born and raised there. My parents are like the other families in Asaf Riata are farmers, like keep sheep and cultivate the land. And this is how the people lives in our area. But today, their life, it's different, for sure, because we don't have access to majority of the land due to the settlements and military bases are built on our land for this past decade. So my parents all the time were like activists and were trying to change the reality that we are living in, as you saw a little bit of the stories in the No Other Land documentary.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah.
And you wanted to make him film about your community, about the West Bank for a long time? So for me, it wasn't the idea from the beginning. I started like when I was a teenager to take a camera and document what's going on around me and to me, to my family, to the community that I live in in order to have the evidence. And as well, I was like a bit kind of angry and want the world to know that we face what we face and we're living in these conditions and people should care about what's happening to us and it should not continue.
This is what's happening in my village now. Soldiers are everywhere.
And where were you sending this evidence? So some of them we used for social media. All of them are in our archive. On our hand, some of the footage that we got helped different people in court cases as evidence and as a proof against the claims of the settler soldiers when they tried to lie about certain incidents. So we would have evidence that we filmed that incident to show to the judge or to the court.
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