Hot on the heels of its IDA Awards success, No Other Land (Palestine/Norway/US) by Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Basel Adra & Hamdan Ballal, was named winner in the European Documentary category of the 37th European Film Awards.
The European Young Audience Award went to The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (Norway) by Benjamin Ree, produced by Ingvil Giske.
In No Other Land, 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. He crosses paths with Yuval, an Israeli journalist who joins his struggle, and for over half a decade they fight against the expulsion while developing an impossible friendship. 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 that region, as an act of creative resistance to apartheid and a search for a path towards equality and justice.
The other nominees in the European Documentary category were:
- BYE BYE TIBERIAS (France, Belgium, Palestine, Qatar), directed by Lina Soualem, produced by Jean-Marie Nizan, Guillaume Malandrin & Ossama Bawardi
- DAHOMEY (France, Senegal), directed by Mati Diop, produced by Eve Robin, Judith Lou-Lévy & Mati Diop
- IN LIMBO (Poland), directed by Alina Maksimenko, produced by Filip Marczewski
- SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT (France, Belgium, Netherlands), directed by Johan Grimonprez, produced by Daan Milius & Rémi Grellety
In a statement posted on the European Film Awards website, filmmakers Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, Basel Adra & Hamdan Ballal say of No Man’s Land: “We’re making this film together, as 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 the 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 with 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.”
European Young Audience Award
The European Young Audience Award went to The Remarkable Life of Ibelin (Norway) by Benjamin Ree, produced by Ingvil Giske.
In the film (which won the Directing Award: World Cinema Documentary and Audience Award at Sundance 2024), Mats Steen, a Norwegian gamer, died of a degenerative muscular disease at the age of 25. His parents mourned what they thought had been a lonely and isolated life, until they started to receive messages from online friends around the world…
It is a film about a subject who was wheelchair-bound for a large part of his life. Nonetheless, it has scope and visual dynamism – Ree takes the remarkable decision to dramatise and recreate Mats’ digital life in World of Warcraft.
“Ibelin as a film has a lot of different forms to tell a story. We begin the story in very traditional documentary style with interviews and archival footage,” director Rees told Business Doc Europe. “It’s a traditional family that gets a traditional form. But then, gradually, as we change perspective, as we enter Mats’ perspective, it becomes more essayistic and stream of consciousness…and then gradually the film becomes an animated film. We use both 3D animation from the game but also 2D animation.”
