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An Interview with Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham
No Other Land is a documentary set in Masafer Yatta, a cluster of twenty small villages in the occupied West Bank. Like many bucolic Palestinian hamlets, it is vanishing from Israeli maps. For the past ten years, Basel Adra, a lawyer and Masafer Yatta native, has been filming the resultant diaspora. He had help from his friend, Hamdan Ballal, a photographer and human-rights researcher, whose village has been razed seven times. Brandishing a small handheld camera, Basel documented expulsions of his neighbors by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and violent encounters with Israeli settlers.
In the opening sequence, Basel is driving very fast on an unpaved road. It is evening and he is listening to urgent telephone messages of an imminent IDF raid on one of the villages. He arrives at the scene, with a wall of idling police vehicles amid the chaotic movements of soldiers and frightened villagers, uncertain exactly where the forces will strike. He takes pictures with his cellphone that will later be uploaded to social media. Basel's thoughts then turn to his earliest childhood memory, when he was five years old, and he was awakened by a glaring light. It was his father's first arrest.
Basel's life is patterned by panicked calls and texts, day and night, and by the approaching sound of sirens, tocsins that demand action or flight. This dogged activism spurred Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham to visit Masafer Yatta. Accompanied by cinematographer Rachel Szor, they were seeking Basel's help for their coverage of the escalating rate of Palestinian displacement in the northern West Bank. Over several meetings, depicted in the documentary, the two young men, both in their twenties, separated by ethnicity, upbringing, and the geography of occupation, forged a friendship. Yuval's coverage of events increases the number of views on social media, but both men have long felt the exigency of transition to a broader audience. In partnership with Hamdan and Rachel, they set out to write and direct this disquieting and skillfully directed portrait of Palestinian life under Israeli Occupation.
The documentary is comprised partly of footage shot over a period of five years by Basel and Yuval on the same small handheld cameras Basel had been...