"No Other Land" is a an antidote to dehumanization of Palestinians. Now if audiences could only get to see it.

Your correspondent saw it Monday evening. He was lucky.

Thanks to the fact that I live 18 minutes’ drive from the independent Jacob Burns Film Center in Westchester County, New York, I was able to see “No Other Land” the afternoon after it won the Oscar for best documentary feature film. I believe it is also currently playing at the Film Forum in Manhattan. The film does not yet have an American distributor, although it is being distributed in 24 other countries. But the independent booker mTuckman Media is handling its bookings at some theaters around the country, and perhaps the Oscar win will overcome the obvious reluctance of major distributors to take it on—a form of self-censorship of a film that really needs to be seen by everyone.

I will not describe its contents here, as by now there have been many articles published about the film; but it is important to realize that the ethnic cleansing and destruction of Palestinian homes in the West Bank it chronicles at Masafer Yatta are still going on with a vengeance all over the occupied territories. This is true despite the ruling last year by the International Court of Justice that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands is illegal under international law—something that the experts, along with the United Nations, have been saying for decades.

I did want to say something about the approach of the filmmakers. This would just be a rough estimate, but I would guess that at least half of the frames of this roughly hour and a half film were close ups, including many extreme close ups of faces. This is even true of the Israeli soldiers, even if we do not get to hear them say anything more than order Palestinians to get out of the way while their homes—and ultimately, the community’s school—are destroyed by bulldozers.

The effect of these closeups, and the filming of the wanton destruction at very close quarters, was very stark. One might say that while the Palestinians have been dehumanized by Israeli and most mainstream Western media since the existence of Israel itself, the film does the very opposite—it engages in what might be called the ultra-humanization of its protagonists, including the many children who cannot understand why anyone would want to demolish their homes.

This is exactly why, of course, so many do not want you to see the film, and why Israeli leaders have condemned its Oscar win. And it’s exactly why you should do everything you can to go see it, and to urge your local cinema to show it.

Filmmakers: Palestinian Basel Adra (left) and Israeli Yuval Abraham (right.)

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