During the celebrated 2025 Oscar night, No Other Land was awarded Best Documentary Film. It is a film about the destruction and forced displacement carried out by Israeli settlers in the southern West Bank. Made by an Israeli-Palestinian collective, since its independent release in 2024 it has won numerous awards, including at the Berlin Film Festival.

What No Other Land tells us

The documentary No Other Land was filmed between 2019 and 2023 and features two of its four directors as protagonists: Basel Adra, Palestinian, and Yuval Abraham, Israeli (the other two are Iranian Rachel Szor and Palestinian Hamdan Ballal).

I started filming when our end began.

Basel Adra

The documentary portrays the reality of Masafer Yatta, where Basel lives — a reality defined by systematic destruction and violence at the hands of Israeli settlers, where Palestinian lives are upended by forced displacement, the demolition of their homes, and the occupation of their land.

From the very beginning of the documentary we witness bulldozers and tanks arriving in the villages of Masafer Yatta, in the hills south of Hebron, to raze Palestinian homes to the ground, seize land, pour concrete into water sources, sever electricity cables — all in order to turn the area into an Israeli military training ground. We see these scenes through Basel's eyes, with the camera he never sets down, and through Yuval who, with his journalist's "pen", refuses to stop bearing witness to the violence of his own country.

I think people need to understand how to make a difference.

Yuval Abraham

The strength of Palestinian resistance

Through the bond between the two we discover their thoughts on what is happening and what may happen in the future, but also on a history that has been repeating itself for decades. Basel seems to "inherit" an activist spirit from his parents, channelling anger into action to make the voice of the Palestinian people heard against systematic Israeli abuses and violence. We witness protests for rights over their own land, the risk of being arrested, or of losing one's life for having resisted.

The hardest struggle is to remain on your own land.

No Other Land, however, is also a film about resistance — about the Palestinian people's deep bond with their land, about clinging to life and celebrating it. We see people watching their home be destroyed before their eyes, and finding the strength to build another one, perhaps at night, or to recreate it inside the hillside caves. People who assert their right to their land because it has been theirs "forever", for generations, and who shout their rage in order to stay. Because there is "no other land".

Masafer Yatta exists for a reason. We are people who cling to life.

The film's footage ends just before 7 October. Since then the situation has worsened: according to an Amnesty International statement from late February 2025, Masafer Yatta is under imminent threat of forced transfer.

No Other Land is a documentary that depicts without filters what is happening not only in Masafer Yatta. It is painful, it provokes anger, and that is precisely why it is necessary.

The directors — Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal, Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham — accepted the award on Oscar night, recalling that there is another path, another possibility, one without ethnic supremacy, without destruction, because one people cannot be safe if the other is not free.

Where to watch No Other Land

The documentary is still screening in cinemas across Italy. In streaming