Even at a time when President Trump is talking about permanently expelling Palestinians from Gaza and the Republican Party has been banning books from schools, it’s still surprising that No Other Land cannot find a US distributor despite being nominated for an Oscar for best documentary.

The Palestinian-Israeli co-production, which focuses on the Israeli government’s efforts to force Palestinians from their village of Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, was also nominated for a Bafta and won best documentary at last year’s Berlinale film festival. Accepting the award, the film’s Jewish Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham said he could not celebrate when Palestinians were being “slaughtered and massacred”, demanded an end to Germany’s arms sales to Israel and decried the “apartheid” that meant his Palestinian co-director Basel Adra did not have the same voting rights or freedom of movement despite living 30 minutes away from him – a situation raised in the film. Inevitably, German politicians attacked the film and the speech, calling for the Berlinale, which distanced itself from Abraham’s statement, to lose its state funding, leading the minister of state for culture, Claudia Roth, of the liberal Green Party, to claim she was only applauding Yuval and not Adra, amidst calls for her resignation.

Despite the refusal of major distributors to handle the film – about which the United States’ “cancel culture” warriors have been unsurprisingly silent – No Other Land will still screen in the US after independent distributors Cinetic Media agreed to facilitate screenings. The repression has prompted an outpouring of support for Abraham, Adra and their co-directors Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor from across the film industry: director Brady Corbet, whose epic The Brutalist (2024) has, perhaps unfairly, been accused of promoting Zionism, demanded No Other Land be released in the US after it won a New York Film Critics Circle award. Effectively self-distributed, No Other Land has had a limited run in New York City and Los Angeles and screened in 100 other cinemas across the country – unusual for a film that has earned so many awards and accolades (Adra and Abraham have discussed the situation in Variety and IndieWire).

What is it about No Other Land that has made US distributors decline the film when it has been widely screened – including in other genocide-abetting countries, such as Germany or the United Kingdom? Certainly, the film unflinchingly confronts the realities of Israel’s illegal occupation of the West Bank, which could not be sustained without significant US backing. There is none of the absurdist humour or magic realism of Palestinian director Elia Suleiman’s feature films; none of the idiosyncratic narrative structure or wider historical context of Jewish Israeli  Avi Mograbi’s documentaries. What makes No Other Land so harrowing, and so powerful in conveying such injustice and horror, is how effectively it captures day-to-day life, especially the passage of time – it’s short at 95 minutes, but it seems far longer.

“They destroy us slowly. Every week, a home,” says Adra, narrating the film. “Every week, a new family must decide: Endure, or leave their land.” Palestinians have much to endure in Masafer Yatta, a set of 19 hamlets established more than 60 years before the Nakba. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers knock down buildings on a spurious pretext, wait for the residents to rebuild, then come back to demolish any replacements. One of the most memorable, and infuriating, sequences of this type concerns a school. By this point, more than halfway through, we’ve seen so much wanton destruction that we know it will not stand for long. When it is inevitably bulldozed, we’re furious in our powerlessness to stop it – much like the people of Masafer Yatta.

The one thing that provides a little hope in No Other Land is the friendship between Abraham and Adra, a trained lawyer turned activist and filmmaker. Abraham attracts suspicion from all sides, and we see him struggling to justify his presence both to the IDF soldiers, who label him a traitor, and to the Masafer Yatta villagers, who say they cannot trust any Israeli, no matter their stated intentions. Adra goes into hiding after the IDF identifies him as a threat, and Abraham heightens his considerable risk by maintaining contact with Adra and continuing to make their film. Abraham remains aware of his different status, being allowed to drive on Israeli roads and leave at any time, while Adra talks about how several generations of his family have endured the occupation, with their optimism that it might end fading as soldiers sever irrigation pipes and pour concrete down wells, and settlers go on shooting sprees. The film was completed just before October 2023 – as Israel escalates its attacks on the West Bank during the ceasefire in Gaza, that optimism feels further away than ever.

Leaving the cinema when we saw it in November, when the United Nations reported death toll in Gaza was over 40,000, my friends and I expressed surprise that No Other Land could have been made, given how much direct footage it includes of IDF soldiers. Avi Mograbi has spoken about how he could film soldiers for his documentaries because he is Israeli. Abraham does it in No Other Land, but so do Adra and other Palestinians. Again we sense immediate danger, and see people getting shot, including at a demonstration against the IDF where soldiers shoot and paralyse a man trying to save a portable generator from his home. We reflected that perhaps the IDF allowed such filming because of the enervating effect they expect films such as No Other Land to have on their audiences, as well as the opportunity they create for Israel advocates to bully critical voices out of the political and cultural mainstream.

Certainly, they have tried to do this to Abraham. Kai Wegner, the mayor of Berlin, called Abraham’s Berlinale speech “unacceptable”, asking the organisers “to ensure that such incidents do not happen again”. As Abraham prepared to go back to Israel, people threatened to meet him at the airport while rightwing mobs went to his family home to search for him. Yet Abraham and Adra continue to speak out, amplified by the film’s critical acclaim. Most recently, they have joined the critics of Trump’s proposal to cleanse Palestinians from Gaza. With politicians flailing in the face of Trump’s outrageous proposal, and his administration’s clear intention to heighten censorship whilst demanding freedom of speech for fascists, the arts have assumed a level of importance unknown in the US since Jesse Helms’ Aids amendments in 1987.

Hollywood and the rest of the US film industry will find itself in Trump’s crosshairs for being “woke” no matter what it does, or doesn’t do, and any talk of resistance to the government’s far-right agenda intensifies will mean nothing if they acquiesce to his assault on the Palestinians and silencing of their voices. It is up to everyone in the film industry – not just creators, but producers, distributors, agents, marketers – to bring No Other Land to as many people as possible.