In the documentary No Other Land, a handheld camera represents a way of recording and revealing, a form of witness and an affirmation of memory. “I started filming when we started to end,” says journalist Basel Adra, now twenty-eight, an activist from a family of activists, who comes from Masafer Yatta, a community of twenty small villages in the West Bank mountains.
No Other Land, which opens on 21 November, won the Berlin Film Festival’s best documentary and audience awards this year. Adra is at its centre, and running through the film is the reality of life in his community and his developing relationship with an Israeli journalist, Yuval Abraham.
Abraham, who comes from nearby Be’er Sheva and speaks Arabic, arrives in 2019 to do interviews for a story. “Yuval, please be sensitive with these people,” Adra says at their first meeting. People tell him they assume he is a “human rights Israeli” who will come and go, but his commitment turns out to be more enduring.
No Other Land is credited to four writer-directors: Adra, Abraham, Masafer Yatta resident Hamdan Ballal and Israeli cinematographer Rachel Szor (who also has a director of photography credit). It is a deftly assembled film, organised by season and year. Though it incorporates some family video, archival footage and occasional clips of news reports, most of it is shot in the moment, and its immediacy is its strength.
There are elegantly composed images and there is occasional footage of the everyday, of children playing, family events, small quotidian moments. Then there is the recurring footage of the arrival of Israeli soldiers, bringing bulldozers and demolition orders, forcing people to evacuate their houses, directing bulldozers to crush everything from homes to a school building to a playground to a chicken coop. Some footage is messy, frantic, filmed on the run and under threat, mostly by Adra. There is a sense, at times, of repetition, but this is very much the point. What is happening in Masafer Yatta is an ongoing process of dehumanisation and destruction.
This is a story about power, Adra says, as he recalls events that happened years ago. Video footage shows a fleeting, high-profile visit to the area by Middle East special envoy Tony Blair at a time when a school was due to be demolished. Afterwards the school was given a reprieve, as were the streets he visited.
Now, after a legal battle that lasted twenty-two years, an Israeli court has ruled in the army’s favour and Masafer Yatta is to be turned into a military training ground. Thousands of Palestinians will be expelled, and this, briefly, becomes a news story. But as No Other Land shows, a cycle of eviction, demolition, rebuilding and destruction has been going on for years. This is what Adra and his community have been filming and protesting against.
There are also moments of extreme violence. When soldiers come to take away construction tools and generators, one of them shoots a man at close range. He is paralysed from the neck down; his fate becomes a focus of media attention, but it is only temporary and his situation is dire.
Alongside the documenting of the moment, scenes show Adra and Abraham’s desire to reflect on what they are doing as they film and post stories; we see them challenge each other on intentions and expectations, sometimes light-heartedly, sometimes with a sense of futility or frustration.
The connection between the two men is an essential element of the film, as is the stark contrast in their circumstances. Abraham is at pains to point out the differences amid the similarities. They are of a similar age and live close to each other, but Adra, as a Palestinian, is living under a drastically more limited set of laws and constraints.
In the last encounter of the film, they are sitting together in the dark, smoking and asking themselves what their work is achieving. “Somebody watches something, they’re touched. And then?” Adra asks. It is a question that resonates within and beyond No Other Land.
Polish filmmaker Agnieszka Holland’s engrossing, wrenching Green Border (opens 28 November) is a fiction based on recent events and inescapable realities. It is shot in black and white, which gives it a gritty documentary aura but also — particularly in scenes on the forested border between Belarus and Poland — the starkness of a Gothic fairytale or nightmare.
The film begins, however, in an atmosphere of optimism. A family of six, three generations in all, are fleeing Syria for Sweden, where they already have relatives. On the plane they sit next to an Afghan woman (Behi Djanati Atai) hoping to join her brother in Poland. As they make halting attempts to get to know each other, Holland neatly establishes character and connection.
Once they have landed in Belarus, however, everything shifts into chaos. Their plans for refuge in disarray, they are caught in a terrible conundrum, pushed from one side of the Belarus–Poland border to another, in increasing distress. They meet others who have experienced the same thing, some of whom have grim cautionary tales. And worse is to come.
Green Border then shifts to other perspectives, exploring the experiences of those caught up in the same process. One is a Polish border guard (Tomasz Włosok), who finds his brutalising job increasingly hard to deal with; another is a Polish woman, a psychologist (Maja Ostaszewska), who lives alone close to the border. After a devastating encounter with two refugees, she meets a group of activists whose mission, at some risk, is to supply medical help, supplies, legal advice and support to those who have crossed the border. They are legally constrained by what they can do and where they can go, however; she feels compelled to do more. In various ways the paths of all these characters cross.
Holland, seventy-five, has had a rich, varied filmmaking career. Probably her best-known feature is the Oscar-nominated Europa Europa (1990), based on the true story of an enterprising Jewish teenager who survived the second world war by becoming a member of the Komsomol and then of the Hitler Youth. Her English-language work includes a lovely adaptation of the children’s classic The Secret Garden (1993) and episodes of the TV series The Wire and House of Cards.
Green Border is based on accounts of real events set in train by the manipulative efforts of Belarusian president Alexander Lukashenko to provoke a crisis in the European Union. He led refugees to believe that the border was a passage to Europe, and the Polish government responded to their arrival with extreme harshness.
The film is emotionally direct and immediate, sometimes harrowing but also energetic, supple and thoughtful, made with a sense of clarity about grim, seemingly intractable things and a perceptive sense of the different human responses to crisis and the pain of others.
Towards the end, there is a scene that risks being almost sentimental; it is if Holland doesn’t want to leave her audience entirely without hope or at least some kind of release. This is not where she finishes, however; the final images remind us of how complex and ongoing her subject continues to be. •
