No Other Land: A Documentary Film
A young Palestinian activist fights to save his community from one of the biggest forced expulsions ever carried out in the occupied West Bank. Over six years, he films the shocking process of his community being destroyed by Israeli soldiers, as he builds an unlikely alliance with a journalist from the other side.
A film created by a collective of four Palestinians & Israelis as an act of creative defiance to the occupation.
Director Biography – Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Balal, Yuval Abraham
We’re four journalists & filmmakers who connected through activism on the ground against the Masafer Yatta community mass expulsion in the West Bank. We all have varying degrees of journalistic and film-making experience and education. This is our first feature film, on which we’ve worked together for five years.
Basel, a Palestinian filmmaker born in 1996, has documented reality in his home community of Masafer Yatta since the age of fourteen, and worked for various human rights organizations and as a journalist. Yuval, an Israeli filmmaker born in 1995, is a journalist who has spent years writing about the Israeli occupation, mostly in Hebrew. Rachel, an Israeli filmmaker born in 1994, is a video journalist and a cinematographer. Hamdan, a Palestinian filmmaker born in 1989, is a photographer, farmer, and human rights researcher.
Director Statement
We’re making this film together, as a Palestinian-Israeli collective, because we desperately want to stop the ongoing expulsion of the community of Masafer Yatta, and because we want to resist the reality of Apartheid we were born into – from opposite, unequal, sides.
Life in our land is becoming scarier, more violent, more oppressive, every day – and we feel
helpless, fighting against very powerful systems of control. We can only shout out something radically different to the world – this film – which at its core, is not only proof of a war crime taking place in the present, but also a proposal for the future, a search for a path towards equality between us and an end to Apartheid.
We’re making this film because we are trying to understand how to create change. Because every week, more and more families are evicted from Masafer Yatta. Because we’re not sure what else we can do.
