The Boston Palestine Film Festival runs in person across various venues from October 18 through October 27. Click here for the schedule and ticket info, and watch the site for Joshua Polanski’s continuing coverage.

NO OTHER LAND (2024) dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, & Rachel Szor

People all over the world watch petrified as Palestinians in Gaza perish in mass, starve, burn, and worse. It’s not the first ethnic cleansing and it won’t be the last– and, for those in Palestine, it’s not even necessarily something new– but the dominant presence of new media makes what’s been happening in Gaza over the past year-plus different than what happened in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s or in the more media-limited China of the present. In real-time, the war crimes are even more incredulous than in the history books. On some level, the conversation seems to have changed around the Israeli occupation; on another level, nothing has changed for the better, and the good-willed solidarity twists into virtue signaling without material actions. The two friends at the center of No Other Land, an Israeli journalist and a Palestinian activist, ask each other this same question in one of the festival’s two Palestinian-Norwegian co-productions. “Somebody watches something, they’re touched, and then [what]?” 

The imperfect model of solidarity No Other Land puts forward is none other than one of the film’s four directors, Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist who befriends Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta in the West Bank. The other two directors are also respectively Palestinian and Israeli. As Basel documents the destruction and forced expulsion of his village for the creation of Israeli military training grounds, Yuval does not sit idle and twiddle his thumbs. Shoulder to shoulder with the villagers, he gets in the faces of the soldiers and makes rhetorical appeals to them in Hebrew. He grieves with them. They dream of a better future together. The solidarity also has its inevitable limits; Yuval may say the right things and share the right feelings, but he gets to go home at night and sleep in comfort. He gets to come and go in the West Bank as he pleases, a freedom of movement not enjoyed by his friend Basel. If Basel wanted to visit Yuval, he would need a permit from the occupying authorities.

As a non-Hebrew speaker, one of the most dumbfounding moments for me was the featured clips from right-wing Israeli news. The peddlers of hatred make no pretenses to hide their genocidal rhetoric. It’s clear from these clips that what these particular Zionists think is at stake is none other than racial superiority. English-language news outlets as bad as Fox at least hide their racism with a little makeup. 

I’m not sure Bael or Yuval has an answer to the question, “And then what?” and that’s okay. The point of No Other Land is to rouse. And rouse it does. The camera witnesses and the filmmakers choose to share targeted violence so grueling that fiction would struggle to repeat. Unfortunately, images of Israeli soldiers killing Arabs live on camera no longer has the incredulous evil novelty it once did. (This is also a reminder that for Palestinians the violence did not begin on October 7th of last year; this is when Adra stopped filming, in fact.) Adra’s final recording comes from a flustered emergency call reporting an attack from armed “settlers,” a word the woman on the phone pauses over. His courageous camera catches it all. The dead bodies we see are not recreations; these are the actual killings of innocent Palestinian villagers. His camera shakes in fear even as it keeps its focus. The only difference between what these soldiers do and Jim Crow-era lynchings is the murder instrument of choice.

LIFE IS BEAUTIFUL (2023) dir. Mohamed Jabaly

There is no film school in Gaza. Mohamed Jabaly had to become a filmmaker the old-fashioned way: by making films. It is the path to directorial success taken by the literal majority of successful filmmakers around the world and through film history. It also creates an issue when Jabaly visits Norway for a film festival in 2014 for his acclaimed first feature Ambulance. During his visit, the only entrance to Gaza, the Rafah Border Crossing, is shut down for the foreseeable future. The Palestinian filmmaker finds himself exiled in Tromsø, Norway, and in a legal battle with the government there to recognize his credentials as a filmmaker worthy of a work visa. He wouldn’t end up reuniting with his family for another seven years. 

I haven’t seen Jabaly’s first film and can’t speak to the professional merit he earned prior to making the documentary Life Is Beautiful, an account of his time in Norway and his struggle to return home, but the government’s refusal to give him a visa comes from a mixture of the bureaucracy misvaluing artistic credentials and from an implicit (legal) racial bias. The campaign from Norwegian filmmakers appealing to the government on his behalf leans into this. “#Mohamed er min kollega” various prominent filmmakers from the country hold up signs and make brief video clips in solidarity with the Gazan director. 

Life Is Beautiful, a warmly optimistic documentary, doesn’t dedicate much of its energy to Palestinian destruction even though the context of Mohamed’s home is the cause of the interference in the first place. He cares much more about the physical and emotional journey thrust unwillingly onto the director-subject. Still, he is a Palestinian, and with that comes a pained heart for what’s happening back home. Early on in his crisis, he looks at footage of Israel hitting buildings in Gaza with missiles in an editing software. He thwarts the explosives the only way he knows how: as a filmmaker, by ending the reporter’s live footage of the attack early. Only creatively does Mohamed feel like he gains any power over the despairing situation in Palestine (a situation that never reaches the present destruction of Gaza following October of 2023). 

Through it all, Mohamed never drops his smile. When he receives the email rejecting his final appeal from the Norwegian authorities, he smiles and laughs as he shares the email with a colleague. I wouldn’t call him a Pollyanna though. He finds his hope somewhere deep and unshakeable, and he expresses this hope with his camera. Palestinian cinema is rarely this hopeful.

Life Is Beautiful
2023
dir. Mohamed Jabaly
90 min.

No Other Land
2024
dir. Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, & Rachel Szor
92 min.

Joshua Polanski is a freelance film and culture writer who writes regularly for the Boston Hassle and In Review Online. He has contributed to the Bay Area Reporter, Off Screen, and DMovies amongst other places. His interests include the technical elements of filmmaking & exhibition, slow & digital cinemas, cinematic sexuality, as well as Eastern and Northern European, East Asian, & Middle Eastern film.