On demand: "No Other Land"

So long as the world fails to secure peace in the Middle East, it may well be the case that every generation has its own Middle East documentaries. The last standout titles on this mournfully sorry front hailed from 2011: The Gatekeepers, a structural overview of the Israeli policymaking process, and the more activist minded Five Broken Cameras, which operated at ground level, describing what it was to be fired at, day in day out, by Israeli troops. This year's Oscar winner, No Other Land, falls closer to the latter camp. Fashioned by a collective of concerned citizens - Israeli and Palestinian alike - it holes up in the hilltop village of Masafer Yatta, to the south of the West Bank, and aims to depict what it is for a small Palestinian community to watch as their homes and infrastructure are destroyed by bulldozers, their neighbours flee to live in nearby caves, and their former childhood playgrounds are appropriated by armed Israeli settlers for the purposes of military training. (Everything we witness predates October 2023.) At the film's centre is the friendship between the two nice young men you may have seen picking up the Oscar: Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist who was raised in these parts by a family now facing the imminent threat of eviction, and Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist and filmmaker. ("You must be one of those 'human rights' Israelis," notes one of Basel's relatives, with understandable scepticism.) This boyish pair would not have been long out of short trousers as that last wave of documentaries took hold, so in some ways the film they've assembled describes a youthful process of discovery: ingrained though this conflict is, these ever more frequent Israeli incursions are relatively new to them. They can't do much else, save hope they'll escape the tussles with their lives. So they film: the way this village was, the way it's now going, what's not shown and seen on the nightly news.

An earlier generation of filmmakers came up with 2004's Private, a droll but brilliantly pointed fiction in which the entire Middle East crisis was squeezed into a single property on the West Bank. No Other Land adheres to a similar, effective tactic, namely reducing this conflict to a few square metres we come to know like the backs of our own hands: one village, one extended family, one friendship. Anywhere else on the planet, that friendship would be the basis of a feelgood story: two kids from different backgrounds coming together for a common cause. Yet in the West Bank, as they themselves acknowledge and have to work around, that friendship is asymmetrical. As an Israeli, Yuval can travel anywhere, yet Basel, as a Palestinian, has nowhere else to go. His movements are checked by the roadblocks that determine who gets to enter and exit adjacent towns and cities; as a sometime law student, his prospects are limited by the fact the courts are Israeli-run. Masafer Yatta wouldn't be the worst place to make a home, were certain forces not compelled to make it a dead end or dead zone. A bus picks its scattered youngsters up for school, the weather's fine and good for farming, and the neighbours crack jokes in the wake of any raids. You feel its residents trying to get on, to make something work for them - but they're smacked down and flattened at just about every turn, their protests broken up, their pleas for justice ignored, their loved ones threatened and worse besides. As an artefact, the film holds to a video-diary scrappiness: no voiceover, not much context, endless footage of a still-running camera being scrambled away from some eruptive standoff. Its subjects come to seem as bemused, depressed and wearied by the relentless, arbitrary Israeli incursions as we are. Yet therein resides the authenticity: this was self-evidently a project shot under duress and then patched together on a laptop amid the rubble, one eye forever kept out for the IDF. As the situation in the Middle East deteriorates, it may well be a given that the formal quality of the filmmaking undertaken there suffers; with no respite and few opportunities to keep a cool head and even keel, these documents are destined to get more and more ragged. Yet the close-up intimacy fostered by this collective does stay with you: few works have done as much to broaden our understanding of Palestinians as people, rather than the statistics, collateral damage or abstract concept the mainstream media often seem to have settled upon.

No Other Land is now streaming via Channel 4, and available to rent via Prime Video, BFI Player and YouTube.