Jahnavi Sen 
New Delhi: No Other Land may have just won an Oscar for Best Documentary Feature, but two film festivals in India cancelled screenings of the documentary made by a joint team of Palestinians and Israelis at the very last minute in 2024.
Both the Dharmshala International Film Festival (DIFF) and the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival had listed No Other Land on their schedules, but the screenings were cancelled reportedly because of the government’s refusal to give the required censor exemption. Another Palestinian film, From Ground Zero, was also removed from the DIFF line up at the last minute. According to Frontline, a small but poignant sequence from No Other Land – of an Israeli bulldozer crushing a Palestinian home – “played as part of the opening trailer before every film, a ringing reminder of what we would not be seeing”.
The film was produced by four Israeli and Palestinian activists and journalists – Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor and Hamdan Ballal Al-Huraini – and documents the struggles of Palestinian residents of Masafer Yatta and the constant attempts by Israeli settlers and the army to take over the land and demolish Palestinian properties. Masafer Yatta is a collection of 19 Palestinian villages in the south of occupied West Bank. Two of the producers – Adra and Abraham – also feature in the film, their conversations and friendship marked by the extreme inequality between them.
It is perhaps unsurprising that the screenings were denied permission. Ever since Israel’s brutal and long strikes on Gaza post October 7 that killed nearly 50,000 people, authorities in India have cracked down heavily on all sorts of solidarity events organised by students and civil society groups. FIRs have been lodged and even arrests made for people protesting Israel’s violence.
India isn’t the only country where No Other Land has faced censorship and a distribution problem. It premiered at Berlinale in Germany, where it also won an award. The filmmakers, though, faced extensive backlash after their acceptance speeches, and were labelled “anti-Semitic”. Germany’s minister of state for culture Claudia Roth later said that when she clapped at the acceptance speeches, she was clapping only for Abraham, the Israeli producer, and not Adra, the Palestinian one. This has highlighted one of the questions being asked of the film community and the world – would the documentary have been as successful (or even noticed) had it only been made by a Palestinian team?
Even in the country where it has won the Oscar – the US – the film has failed to find a distributor, and has only been screened at a few independent film festivals. “It’s a crime if it’s not out there to be seen, to spark conversations. Maybe some distributors are afraid to engage with the topic of Israel and Palestine, but isn’t this why we’re making documentaries, to spark [conversations]? Even if you label this as politically sensitive, I think anybody who watches the film leaves it feeling there’s a very deep truth in the film,” Abraham told IndieWire in November last year.
On winning the Oscar, Adra said the rest of the world must work to end the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. “About two months ago, I became a father, and my hope for my daughter is that she won’t have to live the same life I am living now – always fearing violence, home demolition and forceful displacement that my community, Masafer Yatta, is living and facing every day. No Other Land reflects the harsh reality that we have been enduring for decades, and still resist as we call on the world to stop the injustice, stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people,” he said.