Film about Israeli demolition of Palestinian village wins Oscar for best documentary

JTA: “No Other Land,” which chronicles Israel’s demolitions in the Palestinian West Bank village of Masafer Yatta, won the Academy Award for best documentary feature.

Taking the stage at the Oscars on Sunday night, two of the film’s four co-directors — an Israeli and a Palestinian — used their acceptance speeches to call for Palestinian rights and a negotiated solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

“About two months ago I became a father, and my hope to my daughter: that she will not have to live the same life I am living now,” said Basel Adra, a Palestinian who lives in the West Bank, in his speech. “Always feeling settler violence, home demolitions and forceful displacement that my community, Masafer Yatta, is living and facing every day under the Israeli occupation.”

He added, “We call on the world to take serious actions to stop the injustice and to stop the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.”

His co-director, Israeli Yuval Avraham, spoke in his speech of the “atrocious destruction of Gaza and its people, which must end, the Israeli hostages, brutally taken in the crime of Oct. 7, which must be freed.”

He also criticized Israel’s “unequal” treatment of West Bank Palestinians and said U.S. policy in the region was playing a negative role.

“There is a different path, a political solution, without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people,” he said. “And I have to say, as I am here, the foreign policy in this country is helping to block this path. Why? Can’t you see that we are intertwined? That my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free and safe? There is another way. It’s not too late for life, for the living.”

Also winning the Oscar were Israeli Rachel Szor and Palestinian Hamdan Ballal.

The Oscar win is especially significant as the film has not yet gotten a distributor, which its creators attribute to its contentious subject matter.

This Academy Awards, the second since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack and the subsequent outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, is also the second straight ceremony to feature a speech about Israel.

Last year, in his acceptance speech for the Holocaust drama “The Zone of Interest,” writer-director Jonathan Glazer prompted controversy when he said, “Right now we stand here as men who refute their Jewishness and the Holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people, whether the victims of October the 7th in Israel or the ongoing attack on Gaza.”