You Should See ‘No Other Land’. Here's How to Do That

On March 2, 2025, Palestinian activist and filmmaker Hamdan Ballal stood onstage at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood to accept the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature Film, alongside co-directors Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor, for No Other Land. Three weeks later, on March 24, Ballal was attacked at his home in Susya in the occupied West Bank, reportedly by about a dozen or more Israeli settlers in masks. Witnesses told the Associated Press that the attackers descended on Susya, some of them carrying guns, accompanied by Israeli military personnel. Ballal, seeing his neighbors being attacked, went out to photograph the scene. The posse beat him and others with stones and sticks, and slashed the tires and smashed car windows belonging to a group of Jewish activists at the scene. Not long afterward, Ballal, injured from the attack, was hauled off by the Israel Defense Forces and detained, along with two other Palestinians.

No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary by the Palestinian-Israeli collective, captures over a period of several years the effort by the Israeli military and local settlers to displace a Palestinian community from their land in the Masafer Yatta region of the occupied West Bank, part of a broader campaign that has been described by Francesca Albanese, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the occupied Palestinian territories, as “the first live-streamed settler-colonial genocide.” It captures the incredible resistance and resilience of Palestinians living under the brutality of occupation, watching their homes and local institutions repeatedly torn down by Israeli forces and finding ways to rebuild and stand their ground. It also examines the uneasy bonds formed in activism and solidarity by its central characters and co-directors, Adra and Abraham, who are, respectively, Palestinian and Israeli.

Abraham provided updates about the situation with Ballal on X as it unfolded. “A group of settlers just lynched Hamdan Ballal, co director of our film no other land. They beat him and he has injuries in his head and stomach, bleeding. Soldiers invaded the ambulance he called, and took him. No sign of him since,” he wrote on X. The next day, he shared, “After the assault, Hamdan was handcuffed and blindfolded all night in an army base while two soldiers beat him up on the floor.” Ballal was freed later that afternoon, and went to a hospital in Hebron to receive treatment for his injuries before going home.

On X, U.S. House representative Ro Khanna demanded transparency from the Israeli government on Ballal’s treatment. In a comment on Instagram, actor Mark Ruffalo called on the filmmaking community and members of the Academy to protest Balla’s attack and detention. “No matter where you stand on this issue this is an attack on our beloved art from of film making,” he wrote. “Hamden Ballal is a political prisoner and this is an international incident and violation of human rights. Many of us are not surprised by this behavior from the lawless settlers and the IDF at this point. Kill journalists and abducting film makers is not an accident but a design for the eradication of a people and their culture. Free Ballal!” No such show of support materialized. Abraham said in a post on X that despite lobbying from some members of the documentary branch, the Academy refused to put out a statement, citing the fact that other Palestinians had also been attacked, and thus the incident was considered unrelated to the film. Adra added in another post, “They refused to support Hamdan just because he is Palestinian. Another sign that our lives don’t matter.”

No Other Land is not currently available on any U.S. streaming service, so while there are various workarounds for that problem available to the tech-savvy, the easiest way to see it is in person; according to listings on the film's Web site, it's playing or soon to open in over a hundred theaters across the U.S., Canada and other parts of the world. Despite its Oscar nomination and win, the film was unable to secure a distribution deal in America, but the filmmakers have nevertheless managed to book it for screenings and limited runs in theaters all over the country. That includes Miami Beach, where Mayor Steven Meiner had threatened to evict the nonprofit art house O Cinema over screening the film, who called it “one-sided” and “antisemitic.” He dropped the threat after significant community and international pushback. That came alongside Israeli officials deriding the film, including Israeli Culture Minister Miki Zohar, who called its Oscar win “a sad moment for the world of cinema.”

A week after winning that Oscar, Adra was back at home in Masafer Yatta when a group of masked settlers descended on the village, storming homes, attacking his neighbors and others. He captured the events on video. The reality glimpsed in No Other Land is but a sliver of the violent lived experience for Palestinians under occupation. “No Other Land reflects the harsh reality that we have been enduring for decades and still resist, as we call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people,” Adra said on the stage at the Dolby Theater, gold statuette in hand. “When I look at Basel," Abraham added in his own acceptance speech, "I see my brother, but we are unequal. We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law. Basel is under military laws that destroy his life and he cannot control. There is a different path, a political solution, without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people.”

Ballal, meanwhile, is back at home recovering. Speaking to the Associated Press from the hospital after his release, the director, who doesn’t speak Hebrew, recounted his treatment by Israeli soldiers. “I realized they were attacking me specifically,” said. “When they say ‘Oscar’, you understand. When they say your name, you understand.”