In an over two-minute speech on the stage of Los Angeles’s Dolby Theater on Sunday night, March 2, Palestinian journalist, lawyer, and activist Basel Adra and Israeli investigative journalist Yuval Abraham called for the world to take “serious actions to stop injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.”
The co-directors’ documentary film No Other Land (2024), made in collaboration with Israeli filmmaker Rachel Szor and Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal, won the 2025 Oscar for best documentary feature film, adding to its collection of more than 20 cinema accolades since its world premiere in 2024.
Despite its critical success, No Other Land does not have an American distributor, a publicist for the documentary said in an email to Hyperallergic.
“We were told that people were afraid of distributing a film critical of the Israeli government during the war with Gaza,” Yuval Abraham told the Guardian this week.
However, the filmmakers are self-releasing the film to viewers in the United States through the independent booker mTuckman Media at various theaters across the country, according to the publicist.
The hour-and-a-half documentary recounts the destruction of Palestinian homes and mass expulsion by Israeli forces in Adra’s native Masafer Yatta, a community comprising about 20 mountainous villages in the southern Occupied West Bank.
The region’s communities are at “imminent risk of forced displacement,” according to Amnesty International, because of a 1980 designation by the Israeli army that declared the land a military training and firing zone. According to reports authored by co-director Abraham in the Nation and +972 Magazine, the zone designation is part of a strategy to transfer land to Israeli settlers.
In 2022, the Israeli Supreme Court ruled that the Israeli military could expel residents of several of the region’s villages, ending a more than two-decade legal battle contesting a 1999 expulsion order. According to the filmmakers, this was the largest forced expulsion in the Occupied West Bank since 1967.
Adra filmed hundreds of hours of his own life and incorporated archival footage taken by his parents for the film, which was produced from 2019 to 2023.
The film captures families vacating homes before yellow bulldozers demolish them. In one scene, a woman asks, “Why are you taking our homes?” before a bulldozer crushes a bathroom.
In another clip, Adra appears to be tackled by Israeli forces, shouting “I have a journalist card,” followed by a loud scream.
Other scenes capture Abraham confronting Israeli police. In one moment, a police officer is seen shouting and approaching Abraham but steps back when Abraham tells the officer that he speaks Hebrew.
After the ceremony, Israel’s Minister of Culture and Sports Miki Zohar wrote on X that the win was a “sad moment for the world of cinema” and accused the film of defaming Israel.
Adra said in a press release last year that he and filmmaker Hamdan could not meet their Israeli collaborators in Jerusalem to edit the film because they were placed on a blacklist, and had to edit the documentary from his home in the Occupied West Bank.
“We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law and Basel [Adra] is under military laws,” Abraham said during the Oscars speech, advocating for unity among Israelis and Palestinians.
“Can’t you see that we are intertwined? That my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free?” Abraham asked, addressing the audience, who responded with loud applause.
“About two months ago, I became a father, and my hope to my daughter is that she will not have to live the same life I am living now, always fearing violence, home demolitions, and forced displacement that my community, Masafer Yatta, is facing every day,” Adra said in the speech.
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