REVIEW: No Other Land

"I hope God takes him and relieves him from this life." This despondent remark comes from a tearful Palestinian mother during an interview about her son, who was paralyzed by Israeli soldiers as he fought to keep his property. Spoken in a late scene from "No Other Land", it's a rare but telling moment of weakness in a tremendous documentary about injustice and resistance.

That statement is one of several profound and heartrending utterances littered throughout "No Other Land". The film documents the decades-long struggle afflicting the residents of Masafer Yatta, a community of hillside villages located in the West Bank. Told from the perspective of a young man named Basel, he recounts the circumstances surrounding a 22-year contentious battle on the land and in the courts, culminating in a decision by the Israeli government to evict the people of Masafer Yatta to make way for a military training site. Armed with a camera and assisted by his sympathetic Israeli friend Yuval, the pair thus set out to capture the events as they unfold and enlighten the world to this grave injustice.

Indeed, the film is a testament to the power of the camera. From the archival footage from Basel's childhood awakening to the conflict, to the tense moments as villagers tussle with soldiers, there's a unique impact to this citizen journalism that hits home differently than the typical news media presentations. Indeed, the real-time demolitions and frantic desperation surrounding the evictions elicit a visceral horror that pays testament to the severe power imbalance in this so-called "war". Furthermore, the enthusiastic participation of regular civilians in the evictions support Ta-Nehisi Coates' controversial assessment that this a dire apartheid situation.

But apart from the physical violence, it's the film's ability to distill this crisis down to its most essential human elements that makes it so special. The friendship at its core conveys a symbolic optimism for similarly peaceful relations in the future, while also providing an avenue to express more cynical truths. In one breath, they naively proclaim that their journalistic endeavors will force the United States to intervene (an unfortunate irony considering the film's infamous lack of US distribution). Meanwhile, other intimate conversations find them succumbing to sorrow and despair. 

Despite the film's bleak outlook, there's no denying its message of resistance. Indeed, even Massafer Yatta's youngest citizens unwittingly contribute to the movement, exemplified in a deceptively innocent scene where a group of children playfully point out the familiar mountains, grass, chickens and rocks that prove "they exist!" Indeed, in its sincere committment to putting a human face to the well-known genocidal statistics, I can think of no film from 2024 as urgent, important and soul-stirring as "No Other Land."

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