The documentary No Other Land, directed by two Palestinians and two Israelis, has received broad acclaim on the international film festival circuit, winning awards and being lauded by critics worldwide as one of the best films of 2024. A week ago, it was nominated for an Academy Award.
Despite this recognition, the film has been almost impossible to see in America. Even after its Oscar nomination, the film has no US distribution deal, in all likelihood thanks to its subject matter: the Israeli government’s ongoing campaign to demolish homes in Masafer Yatta, in the Palestinian West Bank, and make room there for Israeli settlers.
On Friday, January 31, at 7 p.m., the Pozen Family Center for Human Rights and the UChicago Film Studies Center will co-present a screening of No Other Land at the Logan Center for the Arts. Tickets are free, but they have all been reserved. If seats remain available 10 minutes before show time, people on stand-by will be let in on a first-come, first-served basis.
The film will be introduced by Ahmad Qabaha, a Visiting Associate Professor in Comparative Literature at UChicago. Qabaha is from the West Bank, and he will share memories of watching many of the events in the film unfold in real-time on social media.
“It’s an amazingly powerful film,” Qabaha says. “It contains both horrible atrocities, the historical context for those atrocities, and also scenes and images of extremely powerful resilience and resistance. It's a political film with a deeply human, and humane, touch, and I'm glad at least some people here will be able to see it.”
“The film is very, very critical of Israeli policies,” one of No Other Land's four directors, Yuval Abraham, recently told Variety. "As an Israeli I think that’s a really good thing, because we need to be critical of these policies so they can change. But I think the conversation in the United States appears to be far less nuanced — there is much less space for this kind of criticism, even when it comes in the form of a film.”