No Other Land, a documentary film about Israel's occupation and brutal aggression in West Bank, produced by a historic coalition of Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers won the best documentary award at the 97th Academy Awards on Sunday.
The documentary follows the life of Palestinian activist and one of the directors Basel Adra, who hails from Masafer Yatta in the Israeli occupied West Bank.
Through the turbulent life of Adra, who starts filming to document the destruction of his hometown by the Israeli regime, No Other Land unveils the less talked about and often covered up systematic oppressions Palestinians in the West Bank are subjected to at the hands of the military and Israeli settlers alike.
The film also captures the intricacies and complexities of a rare friendship between the Palestinian filmmaker and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham who joins the project and helps to amplify Adra's voice.
The film produced between 2019 and 2023 is heavily reliant on camcorder footage captured by Adra, which includes visuals of Israeli soldiers bulldozing Palestinian homes, the village school and filling water wells with cement to prevent people from rebuilding.
The film also shows Israeli soldiers shooting a local man protesting the demolition of his home. The man becomes paralysed, and his mother struggles to take care of him while living in a cave.
"About two months ago, I became a father, and my hope to my daughter that she will not have to live the same life I’m living now, always fearing settlers, violence, home demolitions and forcible displacements that my community is living and tasting every day under Israeli occupation,” Adra said after receiving the award.
He also called on the world to “take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people.”
Addressing a largely American audience, Abraham criticised the US foreign policy which "blocks the path" towards a political solution for Israelis and Palestinians without ethnic supremacy.
With Adra beside him, Abraham asked, “Can’t you see that we’re intertwined – that my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free and safe?"
Beyond the rare collaboration of artists, what makes No Other Land's win at the Oscars historic is that it has made Palestinian content unignorable on the global stage, most importantly on the American stage.
"I’m in tears to see the Palestinian art finally being recognized in such a way. This is well-deserved not only because of the brilliance of artists who made this documentary but because our story is just and deserves all the support and recognition there is in this world," Palestinian poet and activist Mosab Abu Toha wrote on X.
Despite being nominated to the Oscars and winning several accolades earlier, including the audience award and documentary film award at the Berlin International Film Festival in February 2024, as well as the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Non-Fiction Film, No Other Land could not find a distributor in the US.
"It’s important for people to watch it so they can understand what’s going on... Especially in the US which, as a country, is a main player in what’s going on. Americans have a responsibility, I believe, and I hope that they watch it and move in the right direction and take any action they can in order to help us change,” Adra had remarked while speaking to IndieWire regarding the film's challenge to find a distributor.
"I think the conversation in the United States appears to be far less nuanced — there is much less space for this kind of criticism, even when it comes in the form of a film,” said Abraham.
However, No Other Land's trouble to find a distributor is only a trivial extension of the suppression, censorship and sometimes erasure of Palestinian art that have happened with impunity over the years.
Recently, a BBC documentary titled Gaza: How to Survive a Warzone, centred on the plight of Palestinian children amid Israel's genocidal war on Gaza was pulled out after it was "revealed" that its teenage narrator is the son of a Hamas official.
In last October, nearly 19 Palestine-related movies were removed from its collection by American streaming giant Netflix.
Challenging the streaming platform's hesitancy to provide a public explanation for the removal, California-based NGO 'Freedom Forward', in a letter to Netflix CEO Reed Hastings wrote, "The systemic suppression of Palestinian voices and censorship of content prevent US and Western societies from being aware of and understanding the reality of Western governments’ support for Israel’s brutal policies of occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and now, genocide of Palestinians."
Speaking of the erasure and censorship of Palestinian stories and culture, Palestinian-American academic Edward Said, in his essay titled 'Permission to Narrate', emphasised that Palestinians are being systematically denied the agency to tell their own stories.
He stated that the West’s biased coverage and suppression of Palestinian narratives distorts the region’s history and justifies Israeli aggression, which is why, for a more truthful understanding of history, Palestinians needed the right “to narrate.”
Given the context of a history of suppression of Palestinain content, some Palestinians think what made No Other Land's victory possible is the Israeli association.
"No Other Land winning an Oscar is being framed as a historic moment for Palestinians, but would the Academy have awarded it if it weren’t framed as a joint project? Why did the speech stop at “ethnic cleansing” instead of genocide? Feels like more industry-approved normalization," Palestinain activist Nerdeen Kiswani wrote on 'X'.
Acknowledging No Other Land's victory as a big win, artist collective 'Art of Resistance' claimed there is no way for a Palestinian to tell their own story to the world without the “buffer” of an Israeli & receive this level of accolades.
"If a Palestinian made the documentary "No Other Land" without an Israeli co-director, it would have never won an Oscar, & probably would have been banned and labelled as linked to "terrorism" like the documentary "How to Survive a War Zone," it wrote on Instagram.