Third Cinema

The film begins with Adra getting a call about Israeli soldiers reaching a neighboring village. He desperately searches for his camera and runs to the location. We see multiple bulldozers on the highway followed by several army vehicles, as we hear him panting behind the camera. The demolition begins. Villagers frantically move their belongings as the bulldozers mercilessly flatten their homes. After all the houses in the village are turned into rubble, young boys gather whatever is left as they bring the remains inside the claustrophobic cave settlements.

Though almost nothing is left after the demolition, a woman puts out some milk for a little meowing cat, sighing: “Oh my, nothing is left. They destroyed even the sheep pen.” What could be a more powerful image of a people’s resilience under occupation?

In the late 1960s, discussing the possibilities of a politically committed cinema distinct from both commercial (first cinema) and art films (second cinema), Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino wrote that “the capacity for synthesis and the penetration of the film image, the possibilities offered by the living document, and naked reality, and the power of enlightenment of audiovisual means make the film far more effective than any other tool of communication.” Solanas and Getino advocated for “third cinema,” especially guerrilla documentaries, where filmmakers would work clandestinely for revolutionary transformation in hostile environments. No Other Land resurrects this radical vision of third cinema in its documentation of the viciousness of the Israeli occupation and the everyday resistance by people in Masafer Yatta.

While the film documents an Israeli land grab from the summer of 2019 to the winter of 2023, it also juxtaposes snippets from old videos recorded by Adra’s family and neighbors. We see footage of protests back from when he was just seven years old. As he sits with his mother in a field, his activist father is violently assaulted and then arrested by the Israeli army.

In a later sequence, Abraham gets slightly impatient at how his article on the atrocities in Masafer Yatta is not getting enough views. “You want everything to happen quickly, as if you’ll come to solve everything in ten days and go back home,” Adra tells him with a smile. “This has been going on for decades.”

Uncommon Friendship

Just prior to one of the most shocking moments of the film, which I’ll refrain from discussing here, Israeli soldiers confiscate all the villagers’ tools so they can’t rebuild their homes. An agitated Abraham gets into an argument with them. “Why do you care?” a soldier asks him. “I care because it’s all done in my name,” Abraham replies angrily.

No Other Land is also a story of an unlikely friendship and camaraderie between Adra and Abraham. But the mammoth inequality between their Palestinian and Israeli lives is crystal clear. When Adra introduces Abraham to his friends and neighbors, a Palestinian man scoffs at him. “You’re a human rights Israeli?”

In another moment, a tired and exhausted Adra jokingly tells Abraham that they should leave this place together and go to the Maldives for vacation. As we hear a donkey braying in the background, Abraham teases him that it is probably laughing at his idea of leaving. Both of them start laughing, only to realize moments later that Abraham can go back home any time, but Adra is trapped in the West Bank. The Israeli brutalities intensify, and at one point Ballal, the Palestinian photographer, angrily asks Abraham how they can possibly remain friends when Israelis repeatedly destroy his home. “Can this go on?”

In an interview with Democracy Now, Abraham offers a telling anecdote about these unequal realities:

When I got back home to Jerusalem, I began to go over the conditions in which we were working on the film. Adra told me that when he was a young boy he would always sleep with his shoes on. . . .  He was so used to it as a child that he would have shoes on all the time so he would be ready to run if soldiers enter the village. . . . [In Jerusalem,] I don’t have to sleep with shoes on.

If You Shout, You Won’t Die

Adra believes the documentation of Israeli atrocities in Masafer Yatta will get global attention and force the United States to pressure Israel to stop the evictions. Whenever Israeli soldiers unleash violence, Adra always runs with his camera, shouting, “I am filming you!”

Filmmaking is an unlikely form of resistance in No Other Land for those with few tools left, and its makers risk everything to capture the truth. To intimidate Adra into stopping his filmmaking activism, the Israeli army arrests his father in the middle of the night. Even Abraham has experienced fallout: after his speech at the Berlin Film Festival, he received death threats, while a right-wing Israeli mob threatened his family members. The filmmakers’ monumental courage to provide an on-the-ground account of the brutalities of ethnic cleansing is plain to see. But there are also moments of exhaustion and disappointment. At one point, Abraham frustratedly asks Adra, “Somebody watches something, they’re touched, and then?”

But the hope for film as an instrument for transformation remains alive in No Other Land. Despite its critical acclaim and an impressive record of accolades at international festivals — not to mention its status as the highest-grossing film in its Oscar category — No Other Land has not been touched by US distributors, and the producers have finally opted to independently release the documentary to reach an American viewership. Further, in India, No Other Land was abruptly removed from the lineup in MAMI Mumbai Film Festival and the Dharamshala International Film Festival. Perhaps Solanas and Getino’s pronouncement, more than fifty years back, about the power of the moving image still holds true.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Adra uploaded three videos on his Facebook page and wrote on the intensifying Israeli atrocities in the West Bank, where Israel’s ethnic cleansing campaign kicked into overdrive just as the cease-fire in Gaza took effect, leading to record levels of forced displacement.

And even in the face of death, Adra continues to record the unimaginable violence against Palestinian people. His persistence recalls another moment from No Other Land where, after the horrific assault on Harun Abu Aram, young Palestinians shout in front of Israeli stun grenades during a demonstration: “Raise your voice, raise your voice! If you shout, you won’t die!”