Hamdan Ballal, one of the four directors of the Palestinian film No Other Land who this year won the Oscar for best documentary, was arrested during the attack of a group of Israeli colonists in Susiya in the West Bank (territory occupied for decades by Israel, but which according to the international community belongs to the Palestinians). Below we propose the review of his documentary, published on Toray last January.

No Other Land opens with a childhood memory. It is the piece of one of the myriad of films that the young Palestinian and activist Basel Adra preserves together with his family. He shows the arrest of his father, also an activist, by the Israeli army following the protests of man against the occupation by Israel of the Masafer Yatta region, in the West Bank. From this beginning, one thing on which the work presented in preview of the Berlin Festival in 2024, where she won for the best documentary: that for the Palestinians there is no distinction between personal history and public history, is immediately clear from this beginning. There is no private sphere in what is a collective and continuous drama.

No Other Land: what the documentary is about

“I started filming when our end began,” says Basel, among the directors of the film in an Israeli-Palestinian collective also formed by Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor. To tell his family, his village and his people chose the diaristic form, with the awareness of the need for archival conservation. Because memory is the form of resistance to attempts to outrage to history, and for one hundred years the medial archive has been the skeleton of that memory.

Then no Other Land catalogs recovery material from the summer of 2019 to October 2023, interrupting just a few days after the attack on 7 October by Hamas, with a consequent invasion of Gaza’s carpet (the other slice of territory in which the Palestinian people are split) by Israel. In the videos of these four years, marked in the alternation of the seasons, the documentary collects the repeated attempts of the Israeli army to eradicate families from their homes, because they have been accused of having been built on a territory designated instead to become a training field of the armed forces of Tel Aviv.

The small and agile Basel cameras, which is in turn followed by another camera, take everything back. They resume the action of the bulldozers, resume the soldiers in the face, resume and report the name and surname of those who sign the demolition orders. I am the first and relentless front of the testimony, the j’Accuso conducted on the field of rubble and abuses. And during the most excited moments, in the exact moment when for some reason a camera is turned off, the next one lights up. Which is the most disruptive formal intuition of No Other Land, through which it discusses the sense of a transversal, pervasive, irrepressible partisan struggle.

A fundamental dual line

“I am Israeli, Basel is Palestinian, and in two days we will return to a land where we are not the same”. This is an extract from Yuval Abraham’s speech to accept the prize in Berlin. Because the other important line of the documentary passes through the dialogue between the two, let’s call them improperly like this, protagonists. Although the point of view always remains that of Basel, in fact, the presence of the figure of Yuval, Israeli journalist who participates in the documentation of the protests of the inhabitants of Masafer Yatta is in fact. The struggle also passes through the alliance, and therefore from the spread of the news, from the awareness of those who are outside.

Over the age of four, and therefore of the documentary, the two become friends. And the continuous impact is of strong impact, almost on charges between the fleeting melancholy and the fact, of Basel in Yuval that he will return home in the evening. And that instead he has no choice but to stay there. A place where there is no freedom of movement, there is no work, there is no security in having a roof over the head at the end of the day – as happens in Harun, a young man affected by the bullet of an Israeli soldier who left him paralyzed, to whom the mother’s house is also demolished.

A land still without horizon

There is not above all the dimension of the future: which exists and resists in the form of hope pursued by Basel and its peaceful struggle, but which however does not allow to build a perspective, designing in the practice and further a horizon of future life. Because Israel cuts the current, subtracts electric generators, discoveries schools, breaks through animal fences.

In an action that is politics of abuse, in favor of a project of clear punitive and colonialist mold: it is enough to observe the inaction of the army against the Israeli settlers, who attack the Palestinian inhabitants armed with bars and other blunt objects. But also openly with firearms (distributed to the colonists even on the initiative of the Israeli minister for national security, Ben-Gvir), of which a Basel cousin remains victims.

Yet, despite having all the moral and political reasons to be, no Other Land is never, even for an instant, a dark documentary. The Masafer Yatta di Basel is a sunny, silent, which would be thought to think serene, peaceful, welcoming. A land that is not overwhelmed by the pain and meanness of man. In which I Spigano I smiled in the middle of a siege that has lasted for decades. At one point Basel warns Yuval: “accustomed to bankruptcy, here you are a loser”. But never a defeat.

VOTE: 9

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7as6v3hc86q