“I started to film when we began to end.”
When Tony Blair visited the rudimentary primary school that local children attended in 2009, the international attention – from a seven-minute stop – rescinded the threat. No Other Land picks up the story in 2020, when a court confirmed that the area was a military training ground and the dust from army jeeps, trucks and diggers on the road into the group of around twenty villages in Masafer Yatta would signify that another family was going to lose their house that day. Then a man only known as Ilan takes over control of the demolition. Ilan is very aware of the names of those who document the army’s actions.
More homes are torn down. A young friend of Basel’s is shot at close range. Paralysed from the chest down, Harun sleeps with his family in a cave, and is lifted out in an ad hoc stretcher made from a carpet rug to an above-ground tarpaulin tent during the day. The international media give his plight some attention, but nothing changes. His Mum is distraught at his condition and wishes he could be free from pain, even if that meant death.
Nighttime raids are added to daytime ones. Bare-chested men from nearby West Bank settlements come into the area with their faces disguised, carrying guns and clubs. They smash windows threaten the villagers with impunity while the army looks on. At a later date, armed settlers reappear, without any disguises, and shoot dead a young man. We watch Basel’s footage of the moment his cousin is killed. That’s the point that most villagers around Masafer Yatta give up what remains of their homes and land. After decades they leave.
The sight of children calmly gathering together their classroom resources and carrying them outside when the bulldozers arrive has no local parallels. Watching concrete being poured from a cement mixer into a local well to cut off the fresh water supply is a robust measure and totally inhumane. Seeing Ilan gleefully taking a chainsaw to the water pipework to put it beyond re-use emphasises the hatred behind the operation.
Having reached 2023, the film finishes with a pensive Yuval dreaming of a world where Basel will be free to come to visit him. Basel is not convinced. Harun dies. Official papers reveal that the heightened campaign of forced displacement was “to stop Arab villages expanding”. Soon after the documentary is edited and begins touring around festivals, the conflict in Gaza escalates: tensions and attacks rise in the West Bank.
No Other Land returns to the Queen’s Film Theatre from Friday 22 November. It’s an excellent companion piece to the fictionalised The Teacher, and is all the more potent because it is real.
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