When No Other Land won this year’s Academy Award for best documentary feature, corporate media outlets didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet.
by Raina Lipsitz, reposted from Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR)
When No Other Land won this year’s Academy Award for best documentary feature, corporate media outlets didn’t exactly roll out the red carpet.
The film captures Palestinians’ struggle to survive in the occupied West Bank, as settlers and Israeli soldiers steal their land, destroy their homes and attack them with impunity. It’s also a moving exploration of the friendship between two of the filmmakers, one free and one living under occupation, and the limits of documentary filmmaking itself. Palestinian activist Basel Adra made the film with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, co-directing along with Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal and Israeli filmmaker Rachel Szor. Adra and Ballal are the first Palestinians ever to win an Oscar.
Avoiding detail
Several outlets have covered No Other Land accurately and candidly. Al Jazeera (3/3/25) wrote that it “chronicles settler violence and the Israeli demolitions of Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank.” The Guardian (3/2/25) said it focuses on “the steady forced displacement of Palestinians from their homes in Masafer Yatta, a region in the occupied West Bank targeted by Israeli forces.” A Nation story (11/4/24) published months before the film won an Oscar was headlined, “No Other Land and the Brutal Truth of Israel’s Occupation.”
But in reporting on its historic Oscar win, many publications avoided describing the film in detail, or even by title. Politico (3/2/25) rewrote an AP story, substituting different quotes from the filmmakers’ acceptance speeches, and initially ran it under the headline “Controversial Middle East Documentary Wins Academy Award.” In addition to revealing nothing about its content, the headline erased the film’s name and deemed it “controversial” merely because US companies lack the artistic commitment and political courage to distribute it (Washington Post, 3/4/25).
Politico later updated its headline to match the AP’s (3/2/25), which emphasizes that the film was not made by Palestinians alone: “‘No Other Land,’ an Israeli/Palestinian Collaboration, Wins Oscar for Best Documentary.”
Other outlets relied on the passive voice to obscure the specifics of the film’s subject. NBC (3/2/25) wrote that Adra used his acceptance speech to describe the “issues faced by his village,” such as “home demolitions and displacement”—a neat way to avoid saying who was demolishing whose homes and why.
In writing that Israeli co-director Yuval Abraham “called for an end to the violence that has consumed the Middle East for decades and worsened after Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, and the ensuing Israeli military offensive in Gaza,” NBC left readers with the impression that Abraham was primarily condemning the violence that has taken place after October 7. While the filmmakers are horrified by that as well, most of the violent acts they documented in No Other Land preceded the October 7 attack.
Israelis may have felt safer before October 7, but as the movie—which was shot mostly between 2019 and 2023, and wrapped before October 7—makes clear, Palestinians did not. Even before the genocide, 2023 was already the deadliest year on record for Palestinians in the occupied West Bank. At least 208 people, including 42 children, were killed there between January 1 and October 6, 2023 (Al Jazeera, 12/12/23). Israeli military and settler violence certainly intensified after October 7, but Palestinians were in serious danger beforehand.
Erasing context
ABC‘s (3/2/25) headline and subhead left out any mention of “Israel” or “Palestine,” offering simply that the film “details the struggle of a small community in the West Bank.” What community? What struggle? Readers would have to go far past the bland headline to find out. The article itself stated that “tens of thousands of people, including scores of noncombatant women and children in Gaza, were killed in the first year of fighting between Hamas and Israel following Hamas’ October 7, 2023 attack”—blaming “fighting” between a guerilla group and a nuclear-armed, US-backed military power for deaths caused almost exclusively by the Israeli military.
NPR (3/2/25) gave its story a surprisingly straightforward headline—“At Oscars, No Other Land Co-Directors Call for National Rights for Palestinians”—but added that the film’s directors “called on the world to end what they described as the ‘ethnic cleansing of Palestinian people.’” It failed to note that the filmmakers are hardly alone in calling Israeli attacks on Palestinians “ethnic cleansing”—they are joined by UN human rights experts, former US intelligence officers, Human Rights Watch and Doctors Without Borders, to name a few.
An MSNBC piece (3/3/25) highlighted the discomfort in the room and acknowledged the rarity of the perspectives the filmmakers voiced:
Even if for just a few moments, Adra and Abahams accomplished a remarkable feat: They forced attendees and viewers at home to confront a reality that so many Palestinians continue to face. Some in attendance may have chosen not to clap, but those who watched couldn’t escape acknowledging a reality so many have attempted to belittle or deny.
And yet in its descriptions of the film, it consistently failed to name a perpetrator—writing, for instance, that the film tells
the story of Palestinians in Masafer Yatta, a collection of villages in Hebron, being violently and systematically expelled through intimidation, from destroying water sources and other threats to assassinations.
The piece never said precisely who was expelling, threatening and assassinating these Palestinians, or why. Read more.
