Oscar nominated documentary No Other Land turns hand-held cameras on the Israeli military’s destruction of Masafer Yatta, a group of farming villages in the southern West Bank, delivering harrowing footage of homes, schools and wells being bulldozed and protestors being beaten and shot.Antipode Films
Oscar season flips the usual Hollywood paradigm: An industry obsessed with new releases and opening weekends must now nurture a group of films for months on end, somehow keeping them in the public consciousness without allowing them to grow stale. Best documentary nominees about continuing wars are the trickiest of all to keep fresh – when the subject is on the news every night, how do you maintain engagement without risking outrage fatigue?
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Two war documentaries are the front-runners to win their category on Sunday. The first, No Other Land, turns hand-held cameras on the Israeli military’s destruction of Masafer Yatta, a group of farming villages in the southern West Bank, delivering harrowing footage of homes, schools and wells being bulldozed and protestors being beaten and shot. It’s co-directed by two Israelis, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, and two Palestinians, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal. Abraham and Adra are also its subjects – the former is labelled a traitor by other Israelis; the latter is under constant threat of violence and arrest.
In the second front-runner, Porcelain War, we spend time with Ukrainian artists who became soldiers after the Russian invasion. One of its co-directors, the Los Angeles-based filmmaker Brendan Bellomo, managed to transport cameras to the other co-director, Slava Leontyev, a ceramicist/soldier on the front lines. The film shows us what becoming a citizen soldier actually looks like, while also highlighting the resilience of art and nature.
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Both documentaries are well-made, urgent and heartbreaking; both have won plaudits from critics’ groups and prizes at film festivals. But throughout their Oscar campaigns, their filmmakers have taken different approaches to igniting support: Porcelain War focuses on hope, while No Other Land inspires outrage.
Although they had to edit No Other Land in a West Bank cave, Abraham and Adra are active on social media; they did video interviews for several major U.S. outlets, including The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and IndieWire; and they received an unwelcome assist from Donald Trump’s contemptible suggestion that Palestinians should be ethnically cleansed from Gaza. “We are angry and we want the world to know what we face, and care about what happens to us,” Adra told The New Yorker’s David Remnick.
Since premiering at last year’s Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Berlinale Documentary Award, No Other Land has found distributors in 24 countries – but not the United States or Canada, where it’s played only festivals and independent screenings. (Toronto filmgoers can see it at the Hot Docs Cinema Feb. 28.) So in their interviews and appearances, Abraham and Adra focus on that “censorship” – and on the violence that has only increased since the ceasefire in Gaza. They want U.S. viewers especially to understand their own complicity, and to do something about it.
“The U.S. supports, both financially and diplomatically, the Israeli occupation and is allowing it to continue to happen,” Abraham told Rolling Stone’s Emily Zemler.
“I want people to feel some responsibility,” Adra added. “We hope that they will act.”
Porcelain War follows Ukrainian artists who became soldiers after the Russian invasion.Supplied
The video interview I did with the Porcelain War team – Leontyev, Bellomo and producer Paula DuPre Pesman – soon after they’d won the documentary award from the Directors Guild of America, had a very different tone. “The reaction we’re getting is overwhelmingly connected,” Bellomo said. “People have been feeling a sense of hope, beauty and a kinship with everyone in the film.”
They’re doing in-person screenings in cities including the Hague, London, Paris, Mexico City, Berlin and Taipei, as well as sharing it with Ukrainian embassies around the world. Nicole Elkon, U.S. deputy assistant secretary of state, came to the Ukrainian embassy screening in Washington – as did Leontyev’s terrier, Frodo, adorable in the film.
“The news is this inadvertent form of dehumanization,” Bellomo says. “It says, ‘This is a soldier. This is a refugee.’ It puts people in a box, and that creates a distance. We are trying to use the art of cinema to close that distance to zero.”
“Slava shows us life in a war, and also why they’re fighting – because there is so much to protect and save in beauty, art and nature,” Pesman says. “That approach feels refreshing, so our audiences are realizing they’ve looked away and that’s not okay. We can’t be deflated or fatigued by this story. We need to pay attention. Democracy is fragile all around the world. They watch this and know this could be any of us.”
“When I picked up a camera, someone picked up a rifle in my place,” Leontyev says – in English, which he did not speak when filming began three years ago. “My unit told me, ‘Your camera is a more impactful weapon.’ Because this film is not about Ukraine. It’s about the importance of culture, and the resistance of regular people.”
On this point, the filmmakers of No Other Land and Porcelain War agree: “The front line against totalitarianism is everywhere in the world,” Leontyev says. “Even in countries with long traditions of democracy, you can see dangerous ideas, people who are trying to switch their countries to more authoritarianism. If we don’t stop this aggression right outside our door, everyone in the world will see it through their own windows.”
“Conflict is not binary, win or lose,” Abraham told Remnick. “We all win or we all lose.”
Both teams also agree that “a single act of donation can change the course of a life” (Bellomo), “a film can change the hearts of individuals” (Abraham) and no matter who takes home the Oscar, both teams will continue doing all they can to get their work seen and to improve the situations in their homelands.
“Cinema is alive, it’s not created as a platform to reach a certain event,” Bellomo says. “It’s about creating communal engagement. It’s shared dreaming. To create a film, you dream together as artists. Then the object you create comes to life in the hearts of audiences, and their momentum gives it a future.”
Audiences cry at the end of both documentaries; they give them standing ovations. Some viewers even go home and donate to relief organizations or call their political representatives. Abraham and Adra, meanwhile, are continuing to record what they see, because they want other people to see it, too. They hope it will have “some effect eventually,” Abraham has said. “We are hungry for hope.”
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