No Other Land by Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor was awarded November 23 the IDFA NPO Doc Audience Award 2024, the grand public prize of the International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam.
The award was followed by a special screening of the film in Amsterdam’s Royal Theater Tuschinski. International sales of the film are handled by Autlook.
No Other Land is an award-winning documentary that captures the ongoing attacks by Israel on a network of Palestinian villages in the West Bank. “Heroically documented by a collective of Palestinian and Israeli journalists, the film presents a powerful and urgent narrative,” writes IDFA.
The film has picked up a number of high-profile wins this year, including the Panorama Audience Award at the Berlin and Documentary Award at Berlinale 2024, as well as Tim Hetherington Award at the 2024 Sheffield Documentary Festival. It is short-listed for the upcoming European Film Awards in both Best Film and Best Documentary categories.
The winner of the NPO Doc IDFA Audience Award is chosen by festivalgoers, who cast their votes via a QR code after screenings. The award, made possible for the fourth consecutive year by NPO, includes a prize of €5,000. No Other Land will be broadcast in 2025 by VPRO as part of NPO Doc on NPO 2 and NPO Start.
Synopsis: Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist from Masafer Yatta, has been fighting his community’s mass expulsion by the Israeli occupation since childhood. Basel documents the gradual erasure of Masafer Yatta, as soldiers destroy the homes of families – the largest single act of forced transfer ever carried out in the occupied West Bank. He crosses paths with Yuval, an Israeli journalist who joins his struggle, and for over half a decade they fight against the expulsion while growing closer.
Their complex bond is haunted by the extreme inequality between them: Basel, living under a brutal military occupation, and Yuval, unrestricted and free. This film, by a Palestinian-Israeli collective of four young activists, was co-created during the darkest, most terrifying times in the region, as an act of creative resistance to oppression and a search for a path towards equality and justice.
In a joint statement, the four directors commented earlier this year: “We’re making this film together, a Palestinian-Israeli group of activists and filmmakers, because we want to stop the ongoing expulsion of the community of Masafer Yatta and resist the reality of Apartheid we were born into – from opposite, unequal sides. Reality around us is becoming scarier, more violent, more oppressive, every day – and we are very weak in front of it. We can only shout out something radically different, this film – which at its core, is a proposal for an alternate way Israelis and Palestinians can live in this land – not as oppressor and oppressed, but in full equality.”
The winner of the NPO Doc IDFA Audience Award is chosen by festivalgoers, who cast their votes via a QR code after screenings. The award, made possible for the fourth consecutive year by NPO, includes a prize of €5,000. No Other Land will be broadcast in 2025 by VPRO as part of NPO Doc on NPO 2 and NPO Start.
Audience Award 20204 Top Ten. Film title and average score
- No Other Land 4,97
- Black Box Diaries 4,87
- Things That Happen on Earth 4,87
- Writing Hawa 4,85
- Home Game 4,78
- Neshoma 4,76
- Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat 4,76
- Yintah 4,74
- Eyes of Gaza 4,69
- Apocalypse in the Tropics 4,68
