A week apart, on November 6 and 13, two films are released that powerfully echo the tragic news. They were not filmed in the same place, nor at the same time, nor by people with the same relationship with what they were filming. These differences are part of the powers, limited powers, not to be overestimated, but very real, in the films regarding what has been happening in Gaza for over a year.
Each defined by a singular approach, these films also raise broader questions. We can refer to it from this demonstration which, from 2003 and for fifteen years, was held in Paris under the title “Palestinians, Israelis: what can cinema?”, later “Middle East: what can cinema do?”combining projections and debates, and which gave rise to the publication of two works by the organizers1.
In their own way, Trip to Gaza et No Other Land both provide, and together, elements of answers to this question of the possible effects to be hoped for from films in relation to a catastrophic situation, more particularly that which persists in the Middle East. A question where it was never necessary to understand that cinema could stop the war and the permanent oppression suffered by Palestinenor “resolve the Israeli-Palestinian problem” in any way.
These elements of response relate to the conditions of production of these two films, as much as to the characteristics of the movie theater himself. Trip to Gaza is made by someone from outside, Piero Usbertia young Italian who arrived there alone with his camera in 2018. No Other Land is co-signed by two Palestinians, Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, and two Israelis, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
The gap in time and the gap in space
The first film was shot six years ago, the second does not take place in
Gaza but in West Bank. Both obviously concern “the Palestinian question” as a whole, the long-term tragedy that this people have suffered for decades.
Both, in fact, resonate with the immediate news, namely the systematic destruction and massacres perpetrated by the Israeli army in Gaza right now. Ended with October 7, they also concern this situation in its specificity, and can no longer be seen independently.
No Other Land was showered with awards at festivals. | Screenshot of the image workshop via YouTube
Images of what has been happening for more than a year in Gaza do not exist sufficiently here, but in many places in the world they are shown. These films do not directly add ruins to ruins, corpses to corpses, do not redouble the interminable instant of despair.
And it is the gap that characterizes each of them, a gap in time for Trip to Gazagap in space for No Other Land. Their first, decisive merit is to pulverize the crux of propaganda Israeli so complacently relayed by the Western media, propaganda which fabricates the fable according to which everything that happens has its sole origin in October 7, 2023. As if the unbearable atrocities committed that day came out of nowhere, were a sudden and inexplicable burst of barbaric cruelty.
“Journey to Gaza” by Pietro Usberti
In the incessant noise of surveillance drones or under the fire of soldiers shooting at unarmed demonstrators, Piero Usberti’s film also accompanies the daily inventive responses of young Gazans, without ties to the Hamaswho show him around their city. And from then on Trip to Gaza works, in hindsight, like a long horrified complaint when we know what is happening at this very moment, on these places filmed six years ago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=00CGbRXnTmE
Opening with scenes from the funeral of a journalist murdered by the IDF, Yasser Mortaja, like so many others already at the time, and punctuated by the “return marches” then organized every Friday, Trip to Gaza is also interested in places, lights, sounds, the relationship with the sea, architecture, the imagination and the daily life of those Usberti meets. With small touches, the film undoes the essentialization of this zone, systematically standardized for the exterior as a pure “black zone”.
Without sugarcoating its status as an open-air prison entirely subject to the ill will of its guards, but inventing a myriad of everyday micro-responses, Usberti’s first-person narrative claiming his position as a traveler opens up multiple escape routes. If only by singling out individuals, when all the talk about “Gaza” tends to engulf them under a single sign, of terrorists or victims.
Trip to Gaza
by Piero Usberti
Duration: 1h07
Released November 6, 2024
“No Other Land”
Ruins, ruins, ruins. Homes, schools reduced to piles of rubble. No bombs or missiles here, but bulldozers protected byarmy. And the scene repeats, repeats, repeats.
For years, Israelis, soldiers and armed settlers, destroy Palestinian villages in the region of Desktop Yachtin the West Bank. For years, the inhabitants of these villages, who have nowhere to go and live in the surrounding fields, area declared
“shooting zone” by Israelrebuild. And see their houses destroyed again, the wells blocked by cement flows, the pipes cut with an electric saw. On these lands, their lands, subdivisions of pavilions for settlers proliferate.
For years, Basel Adra has participated in the unarmed resistance of the population and documented it, through writings and images. For five years, like his friend too director Palestinian Hamdan Ballal, he works with two Israeli journalists and filmmakers who came to bear witness to the situation, Rachel Szor and Yuval Abraham.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KSn0rTurvvI
Filmed by the other two, we will often see Basel and Yuval on screen, facing the abuses of soldiers and colonsor discussing how to show them and make them known, but also during the moments that Yuval spends with the constantly harassed and threatened villagers, some of whom live in caves.
Among them is one wounded by an Israeli bullet, a young man watched over by his mother in distress, and who will end up dying. He is the only one mort of the film, which shows in abundance the violence of the soldiers and the settlers, the humiliations, the brutality.
It is one of the strengths of this film to make us aware of the unsustainable nature, in a permanent way, of the existence of Palestinians in the “territories” – we are in the West Bank, in Gaza it was worse, in September 2023, in August 2023, in July 2023… And in 2022, 2021… For thirty years.
No Other Land has been showered with awards in the festivals where it has been presented, starting with the best documentary award at the last Berlinaletriggering controversies which are also part of what a film can provoke.
Thus, beyond the factual and argued description of specific acts of destruction and injustice, the film activates aspects of “what cinema can” – also with regard to what is happening at the moment in Gaza in a massive way, in conditions which relate to the definition of genocide by the United Nationsas, after many others, affirmed Israeli Holocaust historian Amos Goldberg. And while, within the framework of the
guerre Currently, countless crimes also occur, even if on a lesser scale, in the West Bank.
Making the effects of duration, depth, context sensitive, against the dominant storytelling which seeks to make the long history invisibility in which the atrocities of October 7, 2023 are part, is precisely what the device of cinema makes possible, its relationship to time, to space, to bodies, to imaginations, a relationship which is neither that of medianor that of social networks.
Each of the two films, Trip to Gaza et No Other Landobviously deserves to be seen for its own sake. Both moving, but not at all in the same way, together they compose an impressive system of understanding of the ongoing tragedy.
No Other Land
de Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor et Hamdan Ballal
Duration: 1h35
Released November 13, 2024
