Media Obscure Message of Oscar-Winning Documentary No Other Land

 

When No Other Land won this year’s Academy Award for best documentary feature, corporate media outlets didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet.

The film captures Palestinians’ struggle to survive in the occupied West Bank, as settlers and Israeli soldiers steal their land, destroy their homes and attack them with impunity. It’s also a moving exploration of the friendship between two of the filmmakers, one free and one living under occupation, and the limits of documentary filmmaking itself. Palestinian activist Basel Adra made the film with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, co-directing along with Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal and Israeli filmmaker Rachel Szor. Adra and Ballal are the first Palestinians ever to win an Oscar.

Avoiding detail

Several outlets have covered No Other Land accurately and candidly. Al Jazeera (3/3/25) wrote that it “chronicles settler violence and the Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.” The Guardian (3/2/25) said it focuses on “the steady forced displacement of Palestinians from their homes in Masafer Yatta, a region in the occupied West Bank targeted by Israeli forces.” A Nation story (11/4/24) published months before the film won an Oscar was headlined, “No Other Land and the Brutal Truth of Israel’s Occupation.”

But in reporting on its historic Oscar win, many publications avoided describing the film in detail, or even by title. Politico (3/2/25) rewrote an AP story, substituting different quotes from the filmmakers’ acceptance speeches, and initially ran it under the headline “Controversial Middle East Documentary Wins Academy Award.” In addition to revealing nothing about its content, the headline erased the film’s name and deemed it “controversial” merely because US companies lack the artistic commitment and political courage to distribute it (Washington Post, 3/4/25).

Politico later updated its headline to match the AP’s (3/2/25), which emphasizes that the film was not made by Palestinians alone: “‘No Other Land,’ an Israeli/Palestinian Collaboration, Wins Oscar for Best Documentary.”

Other outlets relied on the passive voice to obscure the specifics of the film’s subject. NBC (3/2/25) wrote that Adra used his acceptance speech to describe the “issues faced by his village,” such as “home demolitions and displacement”—a neat way to avoid saying who was demolishing whose homes and why. In writing that Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham “called for an end to the violence that has consumed the Middle East for decades and worsened after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli military offensive in Gaza,” NBC left readers with the impression that Abraham was primarily condemning the violence that has taken place after October 7. While the filmmakers are horrified by that as well, most of the violent acts they documented in No Other Land preceded the October 7 attack.

Israelis may have felt safer before October 7, but as the movie—which was shot mostly between 2019 and 2023, and wrapped before October 7—makes clear, Palestinians did not. Even before the genocide, 2023 was already the deadliest year on record for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. At least 208 people, including 42 children, were killed there between January 1 and October 6, 2023 (Al Jazeera, 12/12/23). Israeli military and settler violence certainly intensified after October 7, but Palestinians were in serious danger beforehand.

Erasing context

ABC‘s (3/2/25) headline and subhead left out any mention of “Israel” or “Palestine,” offering simply that the film “details the struggle of a small community in the West Bank.” What community? What struggle? Readers would have to go far past the bland headline to find out. The article itself stated that “tens of thousands of people, including scores of noncombatant women and children in Gaza, were killed in the first year of fighting between Hamas and Israel following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack”—blaming “fighting” between a guerilla group and a nuclear-armed, US-backed military power for deaths caused almost exclusively by the Israeli military.

NPR (3/2/25) gave its story a surprisingly straightforward headline—“At Oscars, No Other Land Co-Directors Call for National Rights for Palestinians”—but added that the film’s directors “called on the world to end what they described as the ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.’” It failed to note that the filmmakers are hardly alone in calling Israeli attacks on Palestinians “ethnic cleansing”—they are joined by UN human rights experts, former US intelligence officers, Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders, to name a few.

An MSNBC piece (3/3/25) highlighted the discomfort in the room and acknowledged the rarity of the perspectives the filmmakers voiced:

Even if for just a few moments, Adra and Abahams accomplished a remarkable feat: They forced attendees and viewers at home to confront a reality that so many Palestinians continue to face. Some in attendance may have chosen not to clap, but those who watched couldn’t escape acknowledging a reality so many have attempted to belittle or deny.

And yet in its descriptions of the film, it consistently failed to name a perpetrator—writing, for instance, that the film tells

the story of Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in Hebron, being violently and systematically expelled through intimidation, from destroying water sources and other threats to assassinations.

The piece never said precisely who was expelling, threatening and assassinating these Palestinians, or why.

‘A broader trend’

The New York Times  (3/2/25) noted:

Despite a string of honors and rave reviews, no distributor would pick up this film in the United States, making it nearly impossible for American filmgoers to see it in theaters or to stream it.

The paper added that this “made No Other Land part of a broader trend in recent years in which topical documentaries have struggled to secure distribution.” Distributors were, the paper declared in its headline, “deterred” by the film’s “politics.”

But as the Times’ linked-to article (12/18/24) on this “broader trend” pointed out, it’s not “topical” documentaries that struggle to find distributors, but specifically films with progressive viewpoints (e.g., pro-Palestinian or pro-labor), while “conservative documentaries are a partial exception.” It’s clear that No Other Land has no US distributors, not because it is a “topical documentary,” but because its topic is Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

The Times (3/2/25) further noted that the No Other Land filmmakers used their acceptance speeches to call for “serious actions to stop the injustice.” Which injustice is unclear, though the article does mention “Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes” and the filmmakers’ desire to “chart a more equitable path forward for Palestinians.”

The Times described the film as “often brutal, featuring disturbing images of razed houses, crying children, bereft mothers and even on-camera shootings.” But it implied that, as unpleasant as it is to watch, the actions that spur violence and bereave mothers are perfectly legal, because “Israel’s Supreme Court ruled the government has the right to clear the area depicted in the film.” An Israeli overseeing the demolition of Palestinian homes makes this point in the film: The Supreme Court ruling, he tells the people whose homes he is destroying, means that what they are doing is legal.

Blaming Trump, not US

Despite the fact that No Other Land was filmed almost entirely during Joe Biden’s presidency, several outlets sought to tie the filmmakers’ critique of US foreign policy to the administration of Donald Trump. AP (3/2/25) wrote that Abraham said, “United States foreign policy under President Donald Trump is ‘helping to block this path [to peace and justice].’” Variety (3/2/25), using almost the same words, wrote that Abraham said, “US foreign policy under the administration of President Donald Trump ‘is helping to block this path [to peace and justice].’”

Abraham did criticize US policy, but none of the filmmakers mentioned Trump or the current administration. In its piece on the film, Reuters (3/3/25) noted that

US President Donald Trump’s call last month for Palestinians to emigrate from Gaza…has been widely condemned across the Middle East and beyond as deeply destabilizing.

The outlet did not mention that US policy on Israel and Gaza also drew international condemnation under Biden.

No Other Land deserves a wider audience, and Americans ought to be able to see and assess it for themselves. Press summaries of documentaries that would-be censors don’t want us to see are flawed at best, and deliberately misleading at worst. We cannot begin to combat injustice unless or until we understand what it is, and have the courage to face it head on.

This content originally appeared on FAIR and was authored by Raina Lipsitz.