'No Other Land' scores with human story, mesmerizing cinematography, surprising cameos of law

A Palestinian-Israeli collaboration yielded the Academy Award-winning documentary No Other Land, which is well worth the price of admission.

No Other Land plays the Avon in Providence, R.I.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

I disclaim: it was neither paroxysm of wokeism nor Oscar allure that drew me and my wife to an actual theater last weekend for No Other Land (2024) (IMDb). Rather, I was enticed by news that the film failed to secure mainstream distribution in the United States, for fear of protests, and, accordingly, that its debut at the independent O Cinema South Beach drew threats of retaliation.

I'm a sucker for a free speech story. That, and our favorite Indian restaurant is across the street from the independent Avon Cinema in Providence, Rhode Island. I did not expect No Other Land to live up to its Rotten Tomatoes perfect score. It did, and then some.

No Other Land is the product of four co-directors, Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor. A Palestinian activist and Israeli journalist respectively, Adra and Abraham are featured in the film, which intimately depicts the slow battle between residents and the Israeli army over the villages of Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank. The film covers 2019 to 2023, when Adra lived in Masafer Yatta and Abraham visited there to write about the army's destruction of homes in an effort to evict Palestinians from the land.

No Other Land does not try to relate other than the Palestinian side of the story. But it also doesn't try to hit you over the head as a polemic; I had been worried about investing 90 minutes in that vein. The beauty of the film—and it is beautiful, worth time in front of the big screen, despite the tragic subject matter—is in the depiction of human relationships in the face of profound adversity: within and between the families of Masafer Yatta, in how the Palestinians relate to Abraham as an outsider, and, at the heart of it, in the sometimes awkward but deepening friendship of Adra and Abraham.

Law figured in No Other Land in some surprising ways. On the face of it, the tragedy of Masafer Yatta was precipitated by Abu ‘Aram v. The Minister of Defense, a 2022 ruling of the Israeli Supreme Court, sitting as the High Court of Justice, green-lighting the eviction of Palestinian residents for the purported purpose of creating an Israeli military training zone. 

Notwithstanding realist accusations of naked partisanship, the court rested its ruling on the classification of the land, by prior agreement, as under Israeli security control. Civil society the world over decried the ruling as inconsistent with human rights law concerning occupied territories. For more, here's an informative commentary by Yaël Ronen, a law professor in Jerusalem, writing at the time for the West Point Lieber Institute's Articles of War.

Basel Adra and Yuval Abraham receive film award in Berlin.
Martin Kraft (photo.martinkraft.com) via Wikimedia Commons CC BY-SA 4.0

The law figured also into the story at the more intimate level. The film surfaced the fact, which I had not learned from any of the hype, that Adra trained as a lawyer, not as a filmmaker or journalist. Here is an exchange in the film between Adra and Abraham.

ABRAHAM: Nothing on mainstream news about the demolitions. As if it happened, but also, it never happened.

ADRA: We'll keep filming everything. And we have to think how to reach more people in different ways. That would be excellent I think.

ABRAHAM: Why are you on your phone all day?

ADRA: It's from stress. Stress, stress, stress.

ABRAHAM: You're afraid something will happen?

ADRA: Yes, but also I'm stressed because I have nothing to do.

ABRAHAM: What do you mean?

ADRA: I don't know.

ABRAHAM: What?

ADRA: What can I do besides being on my phone? Huh? I have nothing else, only my phone.

ABRAHAM: What would you like to do?

ADRA: Anything else.

ABRAHAM: But you studied law, can't you practice it?

ADRA: That's something I lost hope in. Students like me studied so hard for a law degree. But our economy is ruined. You can find work only in Israel.

ABRAHAM: What work?

ADRA: Construction. No other option. Like you never went to university. What do you think? If you were in my place, what would you think?

The scene captures the utter despair of Palestinians in Masafer Yatta. And at the same time, Adra smiles intermittently. His indomitable spirit is irresistibly charming.

The conversation is revealing, too, of a mesmerizing cinematographic device at work in No Other Land. Adra is on his phone a lot; the phone, in fact, or smartphone videography, almost becomes a character itself in the narrative.

There are two kinds of video in the film. First, there is smartphone video, often the very same clips that Adra and others upload to social media in the online battle of public relations playing out for the world. Second, there is the high-quality video of the movie camera.

Adra and other Palestinians, as well as Israeli soldiers and civilian authorities, are seen constantly wielding smartphone cameras. The film in fact is bookended with older personal video from Adra's childhood. In the conflict, Palestinians use their smartphones as witnesses, for example, announcing to a soldier, "I am filming," in an effort to deter violence. These videos bring raw and jarring urgency to the big screen.

At the same time, movie cameras never stop rolling, and for them, the fourth wall never breaks. When the smartphones are turned off, the movie cameras continue to capture the mundane but moving interludes that constitute life between exigencies: Adra left alone at night when Abraham drives off to the security of his home; the tears of a mother left to care for a dying son.

No Other Land is art and reality at once. It deserves its accolades, and it should be seen. If it tells only part of a story, so be it. It bears truths that must be reckoned with nonetheless if ever there can be a way forward in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

---

Kadai chicken, Rupee Basmati Rice Lager, and chicken madras at Kabob and Curry, Providence, R.I.
RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 with no claim to underlying mouthwatering presentation

---

Can't see sports, Oscars without channel-bundle subscription you don't want? Let regulators know

Gencraft

I filed a comment today with the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice regarding the Disney-Fox-Warner sport streaming deal, and more generally, the anticompetitive practice of streaming television sales with channel-bundling leverage and opt-out subscriptions.

---

9 March 2024

Dear sir or madam at the Antitrust Division of the U.S. Department of Justice:

I understand you are scrutinizing the Disney-Fox-Warner sport bundling agreement, and you no doubt are sensitive to the situation in televised sport since the recent congressional hearings on sport media rights.

I draw your attention to two of this weekend's top offerings in sport and entertainment, because they are demonstrative of the problem now in the streaming industry—which is to say, for our times, in the television industry.

In sports, this weekend will see a meeting of the top two, closely matched soccer teams in the world contending for the Premier League championship, Manchester City and Liverpool.  NBC owns U.S. TV rights to Premier League matches in the United States.  NBC's practice is to break up matches horizontally, across its many media properties and contractual arrangements, compelling consumers to have to pay for multiple services to follow a single team in a single sport.

The practice is worse still: high-interest matches such as Sunday's are available only with the purchase of subscription bundles to channel packages consumers do not want.  Yes, the match is available from multiple electronic packages, but each is an expensive bundle: Fubo, Sling, DirecTV, and USA on cable television.  There is no one-off purchase option, nor even a one-channel purchase option.  The price of one month on one of these services far exceeds the market value of one match, or even four weekly matches.

This leveraged bundling, compelling consumers to buy what they do not want to get what they do want, especially in a billing format of opt-out subscription renewal, is an anticompetitive practice. It is ironic that Fubo has sued in private antitrust enforcement to stop the Disney-Fox-Warner agreement. Fubo's position seems to be that it wishes to profit in the vertical market from bundling leverage, but does not want providers to profit from the same model in a horizontal arrangement. In entertainment, the Oscars air on ABC Sunday night.  Like NBC in sports, ABC is making this popular program available only through bundled channel services such as Fubo, Sling, YouTube Live, Hulu Live, DirecTV, and ABC on cable television. Again, there is no one-off purchase option, nor even a one-channel purchase option. 

Again, consumers must buy access to content they do not want, again in a billing format of opt-out subscription renewal.  Media watchers such as Vulture advise consumers to purchase a television antenna to see the Oscars on ABC broadcast.  Is it not plain evidence of ABC's anticompetitive practice that in this day and age consumers would have to regress technologically to over-the-air broadcast to avoid paying for what they do not want?  Never mind the fact that old-fashioned broadcasters have substantially dampened their signal power, so that over-the-air reception is not feasible for many Americans, even on the fringes of large markets.

Disney-Fox-Warner argue that they must forge an agreement to meet consumer demand, so their agreement is in the public interest.  They are not wrong.  However, they are right only insofar as you already have permitted an anticompetitive market to exist.  For a player in this market to succeed, it must grow bigger, must exploit horizontal and vertical integration.

The fundamental problem is that the market already is dysfunctional.  Market actors are trying to replicate the cable model in a streaming world. But the cable model came about as a function of technological limitations, not market forces.

Is it not self evident that in a free market, consumers would be able to buy what they want and not buy what they do not want?

I entreat you not to approve of the creation of another integrated market player. At the same time, I entreat you, start taking a hard look at the anticompetitive practices that already are tolerated in existing horizontal and vertical integrations, especially through the strategy of channel-bundling leverage and opt-out subscription sales.

Sincerely,

Rick J. Peltz-Steele

(for information only:)
Attorney, Washington, D.C.
Chancellor Professor, UMass Law School

'Gripping' Ugandan documentary makes Oscar cut

Uganda has its first ever Oscar-nominated film, a documentary about political persecution and daring resistance to the Museveni regime.

Bobi Wine: The People's President tells the story of musician Bobi Wine's transition from pop culture to political activist running for the presidency of Uganda against entrenched incumbent Yoweri Museveni. En route, Wine is arrested many times, brutally beaten, and effectively exiled from his homeland.

Here is the trailer.

For On the Media, Brooke Gladstone has a compelling interview with Wine himself and director Moses Bwayo.

In following Bobi Wine for the film, the film crew was itself in peril. If behind the scenes was as breathtaking as Bwayo described, I can't imagine how unnerving the end product must be. Wine briefly spoke on OTM of his torture by Ugandan authorities, and it's not easy to hear, before he himself stopped and said he could not talk it about it more.

It happens that my all-time favorite documentary to date is Call Me Kuchu (2012), which deals with the detestable persecution of the LGBTQ community in Uganda. Call Me Kuchu is hard to watch, but I come away from it every time thinking it should be required viewing for humanity: a lesson in immorality, the horror that results when the great commandment of Matthew 22:39 is disregarded. 

I note that it's not clear Wine himself, for all his persecution, quite gets the takeaway on the LGBTQ question. But he might have come around, and he's probably right that the Museveni regime leverages past transgressions against him.

Anyway, I am keen to see Bobi Wine, which is streaming in the United States on Hulu and Disney+, where the film is touted as "gripping." Fortunately, the film can be seen in Africa and even has been screened in Uganda. Wine told OTM that National Geographic has made the film available for streaming throughout the continent.

Shockingly, Wine told OTM that he is intent on returning to Uganda. Much as I would like to see change for Uganda—I've traveled there, and it's a magnificent country—I hope Wine takes to heart the lesson of Alexei Navalny and well considers his timing.

UPDATE, Mar. 4: I've since seen the film. Two thumbs up, and prayer for Uganda.