This year’s Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature went to a film that earned near-universal critical acclaim, had won several precursor awards, and took on one of the most important geopolitical issues of the moment. But most of the ceremony’s 19.7 million viewers likely never had a chance to see it, because despite its success, the film was unable to secure a theatrical or digital distributor in North America.
Within weeks of the film’s Oscar triumph, one of the filmmakers was brutally beaten by Israeli settlers in the occupied West Bank and then immediately detained by Israeli security forces who allegedly mocked his win during the detention.
Even now that it is an Academy Award-winner – and with the headlines about the beating and arrest of co-director Hamdan Ballal – No Other Land, a film that depicts the Israeli military’s destruction of parts of the occupied West Bank, still can’t be seen in most of the United States.
The few times it has been exhibited in the US, the film was a success.
A late January screening in a single theatre earned No Other Land the fourth highest per-theatre average box office take of 2025, raking in $26,100 for a single showing in New York. In total, the film has grossed $1.7 million by playing in just under 150 theatres per week. Some analysts may say the industry as a whole is turning against documentaries, however, fellow nominee Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, did have theatrical distribution and is now streaming on Amazon Prime. It has earned only $350,000 at the box office.
And still, No Other Land lacks a proper distribution deal in North America.
That’s not by coincidence.
In the lead-up to the 2 March ceremony, there was trepidation about how the potential win would be received by the audience gathered in the Dolby Theatre. The subject matter rendered it what former editorial director of The Hollywood Reporter, Matt Belloni, called a “third rail right now” in Hollywood. The fact is: Even prior to 7 October 2023, a film about Israeli military aggression in Palestine would have been a hard sell.
After the 7 October Hamas-led attack on Israel, a number of celebrities were quick to offer support to Israel – but some also went on to express an utter disregard for Palestine. And when high-profile actors, singers, and activists have tried to show their support for the Palestinian cause in the mainstream US media they have been censored, lost roles, labelled anti-semites, and even met with physical violence.
West Side Story and Snow White actress Rachel Zegler even had a Disney producer fly to New York to tell her to delete a pro-Palestine post on X, claiming it could harm the $200-million-dollar film at the box office. Her co-star, Gal Gadot, a former IDF soldier who has been a staunch supporter of Israel throughout her career, faced no such warnings.
An important moment
Given all this, awards watchers wondered if a documentary so few people had a chance to see about a topic Western media – both the news and entertainment – rarely gives a clear view of, could actually pull through with the win. When Selena Gomez and Samuel L Jackson finally announced its victory, two of the filmmakers, Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra, took the chance to make one of the few political statements of the night.
As Amanda Dobbins, co-host of the Big Picture podcast, said, Adra and Abraham used the moment to speak directly “to the people in the room, and to this country and to our foreign policy and the ways it is failing”. This was less than two weeks after US President Donald Trump announced his vision to turn the besieged Gaza Strip into the “riviera” of the Middle East, and two months after his predecessor, Joe Biden, announced $8 billion in arms sales to Israel in his final days in office.
It marked an important moment. The horrors that millions of people had been seeing on their social media feeds over the last two years were finally and firmly being addressed in front of some of the most wealthy and powerful people in the world. On Hollywood’s biggest night – albeit for a few seconds only – a Palestinian voice was able to speak directly and clearly to a worldwide audience. Including those who remained steadfast in their support of Israel.
“About two months ago, I became a father. And my hope to my daughter, that she will not have to live the same life I am living now, always fearing – always – always fearing settlers’ violence, home demolitions, and forceful displacements that my community, Masafer Yatta, is living and facing every day under the Israeli occupation,” Adra said.
As much as the term is a colonial cliché, in that moment Adra attempted to “humanise” the Palestinian struggle and show that 43,000 isn’t just a number, they’re people. Like him. Like his young daughter. Like his fellow winner, Ballal.
After months of reports of Israeli officials referring to Palestinians as “human animals”, “the children of darkness”, and to Gaza as a “city of evil”, seeing and hearing a filmmaker speak about his hopes for his newborn daughter was an important and much-needed reaffirmation that Palestinians are in fact human beings – especially as Israel stands accused of killing more than 10,000 children in Gaza.
This week’s beating and arrest of Ballal, less than a month after their Oscar win, serves as another reminder of the lengths the Israeli occupation and its supporters will go to silence the voices of Palestinians.
Abraham claims that Israeli security forces mocked Ballal about the Oscar during his detention. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organisation that runs the Oscars, was criticised for being too slow to issue a condemnation, and even when that statement did come – after Ballal had been released – it failed to mention the filmmaker by name, or the location or details of the actual incident.
As online film critic Dan Murrell said, what happened to Ballal is a reminder that long after the awards were handed out, “the subject matter of that documentary [is] still very much a day-to-day reality” for Palestinians.
A systemic silencing
The settlers chose physical violence but, as several reports have shown, there is a much larger, decades-long systemic push to sideline and silence Palestinians in the Western media.
In November 2023, more than 750 journalists signed an open letter accusing the US news media of anti-Palestinian bias. Several British outlets, including the BBC, have also faced accusations of favouring Israel and dehumanising Palestinians in their coverage of the conflict.
According to an analysis of the first six weeks of post-7 October coverage by The Intercept, that bias comes down to something as fundamental as identity.
“For every two Palestinian deaths, Palestinians are mentioned once. For every Israeli death, Israelis are mentioned eight times – or a rate 16 times more per death than that of Palestinians,” The Intercept study of leading US newspapers found.
When the news media is being accused of having “systematically dehumanised Palestinians” in its coverage of the conflict, and an award-winning documentary made by a Palestinian and Israeli team is nearly impossible to watch in many parts of the world, it is far too easy for entire populations to ignore or downplay the gravity of the abuses taking place in Gaza and the occupied West Bank.
No Other Land’s lack of US distribution is clearly not an accident, because whether it be Schindler’s List and the Holocaust or Hearts and Minds and the Vietnam War, film has been one of the most important mediums that puts faces, names and places to massive political issues, including war and genocide.
Let’s not forget that in the 1960s, the advent of television was credited with changing the American and global view of the war in Vietnam.
A doctor’s findings
This month, I had the opportunity to watch a documentary – A State of Passion – and a feature – Passing Dreams – two films about life in the besieged Gaza Strip and the Israeli-occupied West Bank.
Their subject matter, locations, formats and protagonists may differ, but at their heart, both are about the indignities of life under Israeli occupation. And as small independent films, both are unlikely to gain the support of major distributors in the US and Europe.
Had I not been in Dubai and checked the listings at the independent theatre, I too would likely not have seen them.
A State of Passion follows British-Palestinian reconstructive surgeon, Dr. Ghassan Abu Sittah, during his 43-day stint at the al-Shifa and al-Ahli hospitals in Gaza, and his subsequent advocacy work in the UK.
The film shows up-close what it’s like to work in a hospital during constant bombardments: images of babies covered in debris and blood, children with amputated limbs, and family members rushing in with their wounded loved ones in their arms.
We see Abu Sittah telling families that due to a shortage of anaesthesia the only way to ensure quick treatment is to operate without anaesthetics. He talks about buying vinegar to treat wounds and how hospital staff were forced to bury hundreds of amputated limbs of children in a field. He even recalls how the cheaply made polyester t-shirts, worn by the poorest, shrink and burn in a distinctive way.
While Abu Sittah was telling families they had to choose which of their injured loved ones to operate on first, a group of 100 Israeli doctors signed an open letter in November 2023 saying the Israeli military should attack hospitals in Gaza because, “Those who confuse hospitals with terrorism must understand that hospitals are not a safe place for them.”
By December 2024, while Abu Sittah was trying to present his findings to policymakers in Europe, the UN was warning that Israel’s constant attacks on hospitals and health workers had brought healthcare in Gaza to the brink of “total collapse”.
Contrast this with British and American media coverage of Abu Sittah’s firsthand findings.
His assertion that he treated patients with white phosphorus burns is questioned, despite the fact he has been treating such burns in Gaza since 2009 and explains exactly what makes such injuries so unique. He is asked repeatedly whether Hamas was at either facility, something Israel has claimed in defense of its bombardments and raids in and around hospitals. Most ironically, they ask him to confirm what he witnessed, “Because you’re never sure what’s true and what’s propaganda.”
And that was all just during one British TV interview.
In her introduction of Abu Sittah, veteran CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour refers to the Hamas attack of 7 October 2023 as a “slaughter”, but tries to downplay Israel’s violent retaliation by referring to the patients Abu Sittah saw as “civilians who are clearly going to be wounded and killed” in Israel’s attacks.
The Israeli victims get to be just that, victims, while Palestinian death is seen as an inevitability in the fog of war.
A road trip through occupation
Passing Dreams takes us on a road trip across the Israeli-occupied West Bank as a Palestinian Christian family searches for a boy’s missing pigeon.
On the surface, Passing Dreams resembles many other movies. The family road trip has echoes of Little Miss Sunshine, the uncle-nephew relationship could have been out of C’mon C’mon, and the childhood adventure recalls parts of The Goonies. And yes, the dynamic between the two cousins could have been out of fellow Oscar winner, A Real Pain, which was originally supposed to take place in Mongolia but ended up being about two Jewish cousins going on a tour of holocaust monuments in Poland. That movie didn’t mention Palestine once.
But Passing Dreams isn’t just a movie about childhood whimsy and familial bonding, because the 708-kilometre Israeli-built separation wall is visible from the film’s very first shots. From there, as 12-year-old Sami, his cousin Maryam, and uncle Kamal journey from the Qalandia camp to Bethlehem and then Haifa, we see how the anxiety and suspicion of the occupation are inescapable parts of their lives.
In occupied Palestine, even an adolescent boy and his empty bird cage are met with hostility and distrust at the checkpoints that dot their path. The checkpoints, which at times block their path, are both visual cues and reminders that occupation means, even out in the open, you are confined to spaces and routes that the aggressor determines: a constant claustrophobia and loss of agency, even in your own land.
Politically, the issue of illegal Israeli settlements is a running theme throughout the story.
Sami’s family land was taken by settlers and he has grown up with his mother in Qalandia, a Palestinian refugee camp located near the West Bank barrier and East Jerusalem – a fact that makes the prevalence of the separation wall even more resonant.
In Bethlehem, a shopkeeper friend of Sami’s uncle Kamal asks for advice on how to deal with the settlers who will soon take his land as well. When the shopkeeper asks where his family will go, Kamal has no answers despite or because his own sister’s family has been living in a displacement camp for years.
Even in the film’s final moments, a family of Russian immigrants in Haifa are the final new characters the audience and the Palestinian family are introduced to.
In Sami and Maryam – who wants to be a journalist – we can see exactly what Adra said he didn’t want for his own daughter while he stood on that stage clutching his Oscar.
