A film about Israeli displacement of a Palestinian community, No Other Land, won the Oscar for documentary feature film yesterday, and its directors appealed for help to end the conflict and accused the US of blocking a solution.
The film’s co-directors, Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, spent five years making the film, which shows Israeli soldiers tearing down homes and evicting residents to create a military training ground as well as the encroachment of Jewish settlers on the Palestinian community.
The documentary highlights the parallel realities in which the two friends live in — Abraham with his yellow Israeli number plate that lets him travel anywhere and Adra confined to a territory that only ever gets smaller for Palestinians.
“No Other Land reflects the harsh reality we have been enduring for decades and still resist as we call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people,” said Adra.
Standing beside his co-director, Abraham added: “We made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together our voices are stronger. We see each other, the atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people which must end, the Israeli hostages brutally taken in the crime of October 7, which must be freed.
“When I look at Adra, I see my brother but we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Adra is under military law that destroys his life and he cannot control.
“There is a different path. A political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people. And I have to say as I am here, the foreign policy in this country is helping to block this path.
“And why? Cannot you see that we are intertwined? That my people can be truly safe if Adra’s people are truly free and safe. There is another way. It is not too late for life, for the living.”
US President Donald Trump’s call last month for Palestinians to emigrate from Gaza, including to Egypt and Jordan, has been widely condemned across the Middle East and beyond as deeply destabilising.
Israel’s Culture Minister Miki Zohar, lamented the film’s win as a “sad moment for cinema“, because it presented what he described as a distorted view of Israel.
“Freedom of expression is an important value, but using defamation of Israel as an international promotional tool harms the state of Israel, and after the October Seventh massacre and the ongoing war, it is doubly painful,“ Zohar wrote on X.
Despite winning top prizes in Europe and the US, the film has yet to reach a deal for US distribution, Abraham told Deadline last month.
Asked why he thought US distributors had passed on the film, Abraham said: “I believe it is clear that it is for political reasons. I hope that it will change.”
He said they decided not to wait on the theatrical release and released it in almost 100 theatres independently.
