Director: Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham
A joint Palestinian-Israeli filmmaking collective spent years documenting daily life in Masafer Yatta, a cluster of hamlets in the southern West Bank, as bulldozers and eviction orders reshaped the landscape around them.
What is No Other Land about?
Shot over roughly five years, the documentary follows local resident Basel Adra as he records home demolitions, school closures, and the slow displacement of families who have lived in the area for generations. Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham arrives to report on the story and the two form a working partnership that becomes the film's emotional spine. Co-directors Hamdan Ballal and the rest of the collective weave together handheld footage, night-vision clips, and quiet domestic scenes to show how policy decisions translate into everyday disruption for the people living through them. The film avoids narration, letting on-camera interviews and unfiltered footage carry the account of what residents describe happening to their community.
Cast & crew
Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham appear as themselves, functioning as both subjects and de facto co-narrators of the footage they helped assemble. Hamdan Ballal, credited alongside them as a director, also appears on screen documenting his neighbors and family.
Context & significance
The film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024, where it won the top documentary prize, before going on to a wider festival run. It was produced independently by the four-person directing team without backing from a national broadcaster, a point widely noted in coverage of its distribution history. The documentary is credited to production companies based in Norway and the Palestinian Territories, and its long, uncertain path to wide distribution afterward became almost as widely discussed as the film itself.
Where & how to watch
The film streams on K-Time with Persian dubbing and Persian subtitles, so viewers can watch in Farsi or follow the original English and Arabic dialogue with Farsi text on screen. A free K-Time account is all that's needed to start watching; the interface itself is fully navigable in Farsi for the Iranian diaspora audience.