Earlier this month, No Other Land won the Oscar for best documentary feature. The film chronicles the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta as it resists being driven off its land by settler violence and the demolitions of the Israeli military. The film’s two protagonists, Palestinian film-maker Basel Adra and Israeli film-maker Yuval Abraham, gave speeches when they accepted their award.
Yuval Abraham: “We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel is under military laws that destroy his life … There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people.”
In the global spotlight alongside the pair were the film’s other co-directors, Rachel Szor and Hamdan Ballal.
Adrian Horton, an arts writer for Guardian US, explains to Michael Safi the challenges that the film had to overcome during its production and the fact that despite huge critical success, No Other Land did face difficulty in the run-up to the Oscars.
And last week, only a few weeks after the awards ceremony, co-director Hamdan Ballal was attacked by settlers and detained by the Israeli military. He describes to Guardian correspondent Lorenzo Tondo what he believes happened that night and how, since the Oscar win, the Masafer Yatta community has experienced even more violence than before.
Tondo explains that many analysts believe settler violence is part of a broader attempt by the Israeli state to annex the West Bank during the current Trump presidency. Horton adds that at the same time, the current US administration has created a chilling effect on the distribution of some political documentaries.
