We need a new language to speak of new despairs

No Other Land shows how balanced reporting and neutrality become a blindfold when documenting lives where protest is constant and loss inevitable.

A still from No Other Land. | Photo Credit: AP 

A film that is censored is a film that is celebrated—because the state today is such that to be a thorn in its side is to bloom. When No Other Land, the documentary by Palestinian activist Basel Adra and the Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, was denied permission to be screened at both the MAMI Mumbai Film Festival and the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF)—despite initially being announced as part of the line-up—the government’s refusal to give the required censor exemption only drew us closer to it. At DIFF, a fragment of the film, of an Israeli bulldozer crushing a Palestinian home, was played as part of the opening trailer before every film, a ringing reminder of what we would not be seeing.

The film has already caused a stir at the Berlinale, where it premiered earlier this year. Germany’s Minister of State for Culture insisted that she only clapped for the Israeli, and not the Palestinian, filmmaker, both of whom won one of the major awards at the festival’s closing ceremony. The film became a fault line in German public discourse that is still trying and failing to extricate anti-Semitism from anti-Zionism; they do not yet know how to think of the anti-Israel posture as anything but genocidal as they are unable to see the Jewish figure as anything but a victim of history.

In his acceptance speech, Abraham called the Israeli occupation “apartheid” and spoke movingly of how, despite living only 30 minutes apart, his Palestinian friend and he do not enjoy the same rights—to vote, to move, to protest.

India’s increasing tilt towards Israel, especially in the realm of culture, was apparent in not just its unwillingness to let Indians see No Other Land but also in the National Film Development Corporation’s decision to host an Israel Film Festival in Mumbai. An online signature campaign, with over a thousand signatures, including of Naseeruddin Shah, Ratna Pathak Shah, and Anand Patwardhan, led to the cancellation of the festival. Some have asked, was this act of public mobilisation one of censorship, too?

Censorship comes from power, but at the root of this power is fear. That the thing being censored, if let loose, will threaten power. The power could be over a sexual-social economy, it could be sociopolitical—the state is always afraid; the public is always made to be afraid. Therein lies the difference. To boycott is not to censor because to censor is to be afraid.

Thrumming with anxiety

And why would the state not be afraid of a film like No Other Land. It is impossible to emerge from it not wanting to erase the colonial institution that is Israel. Set in Masafer Yatta, a hamlet in West Bank, we see how members of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and armed Israeli settlers walk into this land with bulldozers, court documents, guns, and that colonial arrogance to crumple houses, send families to caves that they have made habitable with an electric connection to fuel their television. In 2022, over a thousand occupants of the villages in Masafer Yatta were ordered to leave because the Israeli military wanted the area to conduct their training in.

Palestinian director Basel Adra (L) and Israeli director Yuval Abraham pose during a photo session in Paris on October 29, 2024. No Other Land was released in French cinemas on November 13, 2024. | Photo Credit: AFP

The Palestinians’ mornings are spent tending to the intuition in the stomach that their lives will be bulldozed. Their nights are spent tending to an itch in the heart that they will be arrested for protesting this bulldozing. The film thrums with anxiety, existential anxiety in the larger and smaller sense. Men are shot point-blank, rendered paralysed, with their movements, both geographic and physical, shrunk. When Adra’s father, also an activist, is arrested, he wonders if he needs to stop his activism and succumb.

When Adra speaks to Abraham about his impatience to solve the crisis, he utters one of the most poignant lines in the film: “Get used to failing; you’re a loser.” But such is the film, such is their life, that even the near impossibility of success does not deter the body from protesting, from expressing anguish. To protest is not necessarily to provoke change but to keep expressing oneself until one day the possibility of provoked change becomes imaginable.

Later, when Adra runs behind IDF soldiers with his camera, he screams, “I’m filming you,” like a battle cry. The archive here is not just a place to document the abuse but also a refuge from a world where victory is implausible, perhaps impossible. What do you do when you know loss is inevitable? As Abraham says: “I started filming when we started to end.”

There is no pretence of balance because the film knows, and hopes we know, too, that the very desire for balance is a desire for lopsided justice. With what audacity do we demand equality in death when people have lived fundamentally unequal lives? The very ask for balanced reportage and perspective is a demand for tarnishing the unequal terms on which the war is being fought. Neutrality is no longer a virtue but a blindfold. No Other Land belongs to this genre of skewed grace.

A new lexicon

This is not the first, nor the last, time that a group of people will hope implausibly while throwing a hammer at a coldly balanced scale. At the Tibet Museum, the opening note declares, “We do not claim to be neutral,” because it has to challenge China’s distorted and widespread narrative of Tibet. There is a video of young men immolating themselves in protest, turning their bodies into burnt corpses. In one of the videos, the man stands still as the flame eats his flesh.

This became a common sight after the 22-year-old Tibetan monk Ngawang Norphel set himself on fire in June 2012, following which over 150 Tibetans have immolated themselves. As Jacqueline Rose writes in her controversial piece on suicide bombers, “Deadly Embrace”, in London Review of Books: “When life is constant degradation, death is the only source of pride.”

We need a new language to speak of new despairs. Old ideas of neutrality, justice, the illusion of life as sacred and inviolable have to fold within themselves the indignity of life itself. For that to happen, films like No Other Land need to be screened, felt, raged at, in order to see what emerges apart from the rage—what new theory of justice evolves as all the existing ones get frayed.

Prathyush Parasuraman is a writer and critic who writes across publications, both print and online.