There is a great deal of truth there. Sometimes special moments happen purely by accident. But most of them happen because you make a plan and create the conditions to let them happen.
very glad no other land won and seeing it at a local palestinian film festival last year was one of the most impactful experiences i’ve ever had in a theater like when the text of final end card came up on screen you could feel it hit the whole room, but even in that moment while watching it it was so obvious why the film was framed the way it was and every time i’ve seen yuval speak during the press tour or read his writing since it’s made it more grating… truly hate that to get this film to see the light of day and get even the limited distribution it’s had that basel has to like. humor him in this way. and constantly share every stage and platform the film affords them because it is a Shared Project even though it’s absolutely basel’s story it’s his community and family and home and his fucking life
basel even comments on it in the film itself, the lib zionist perspective yuval has about the problem and how it’s going to be solved, but that framework is what the entire premise of this film’s existence is built around and especially central to how it’s been promoted and talked about globally. it’s about their friendship it’s about them coming to an understanding, the underlying implication you can fix oppression by making friends with an individual Good Guy who materially benefits from your oppression, whose place in society depends entirely on the existence of this oppressive structure, who decries violent resistance as Just As Bad as the violence committed by the occupation, but he feels bad about it so he has a dream where everyone can one day just get along. that the best way forward is to get this story in front of the right eyeballs in the West, to appeal to the sympathies of global audiences that they might speak out enough to change something… in that way it’s very much an oscar film that hollywood typically loves, but because it’s about palestine it feels like a miracle that it was acknowledged at all. idk just feels bad man
The film’s title begs the question, no other land for whom? We hear it in the Palestinians pleading with the Israeli soldier aiming a bulldozer at their homes. But its echoes are also the film’s subtext, the possibility of a future shared between settler and native. A settler has come to help the natives, hoping to redeem himself and, implicitly, the horizons of the settler-state. Where are we supposed to go?, we can imagine an Israeli asking a Palestinian, having been made a guest in their home, once political reality enters their conversation.
Much of the film, which is ostensibly about the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian villages, is spent tracing the friendship of Adra and Abraham. Several scenes find Adra and Abraham driving in a car, smoking hookah in a restaurant, sitting simply in conversation about the present and the future (the past, beyond that of Masafer Yatta, is generally left alone). Toward the film’s end, during one of these heart-to-hearts, Abraham offers a vision of Israel that no longer denies Adra his rights. He asks Adra to dream with him of a future in which Palestinians and Israelis live side by side. “Inshallah,” Adra half-humors his friend. Over the course of the documentary, by talking to Palestinians and witnessing the actions of fellow Israelis, we see the settler growing, learning from the native. We see the settler recognizing, in his limited way, the nature of Zionism at a pace the Palestinian, here exceedingly patient, can’t afford.
While No Other Land tells the story of one Palestinian community’s depopulation, it also stands in for the liberal’s long-sought-after Roadmap for Peace. Abraham introduces himself to the Palestinians with whom he works as yahudi, Jewish. He offers them his time and energy, and risks his safety, to tell their story. “I need to write something about the protest today,” Abraham tells Adra from the passenger seat, while the latter, driving, focuses his eyes on the road. “I have to write more. The article I wrote on Harun’s mom didn’t get many views.” “I feel you’re a little enthusiastic…” Adra says, and Abraham asks him to clarify. “You want everything to happen quickly … as if you’ve come to solve everything in ten days, then go home.” Adra snaps his fingers before returning his hand to the wheel. Abraham remains committed to ending the program of ethnic cleansing committed in his name, but in the film and elsewhere, he attributes those horrors to the “occupation” rather than to Zionism. His condemnation of the former serves to preserve the latter. This distinction is artificial: from the standpoint of its victims, Israel is its occupation, the Zionist project necessarily one of ethnic cleansing and genocide, of total erasure.
Abraham attempts a rehabilitation of an iteration of Zionism that doesn’t exist but could, a familiar settler hope (think, imagine what America could be). In one clip, Abraham appears on Democracy Now! to say, “As an Israeli, it’s very, very important for me to stress that I don’t think we can have security if Palestinians do not have freedom.” The possibility of this future depends on the actions of individuals like Abraham, although the film itself reveals the futility of this vision. After the Democracy Now! clip, the film cuts to Abraham on Israeli TV. Here, Palestinians are the other: “They have no voting rights under military occupation,” Abraham says. “Basel, a guy my age who lives there, can’t even leave the West Bank, and we destroy their homes every week—” Here, he is cut off by another Israeli on the panel, calling in remotely: “You’re against Jewish people, in everything you do.” Abraham sighs, then pushes back, calling the man a liar, only to be interrupted by him again: “They’re invaders in a military training ground.” This thinking, not Abraham’s, is at the heart of Zionism. Israeli soldiers and settlers taunt Adra and Abraham repeatedly, goading them to upload the videos they record to see if this might change anything on the ground. In the final footage recorded for the film, we hear Adra on the phone with Israeli authorities, asking for protection. We see armed settlers descend on Masafer Yatta, then Adra’s cousin shot point-blank in his abdomen by a man in a T-shirt. Words flash across the screen, informing us that, since October 2023, many such attacks have continued to take place, prompting Palestinians to flee their homes.
…
The film doesn’t engage with other ways this suffering might end. The only resistance we see is nonviolent demonstration. Adra is an activist, a term whose configurations are vague except vis-à-vis violence. The film matter-of-factly captures plenty of violent Israelis, settlers and soldiers, armed and sustained by the state, their bulldozers and their unmoved expressions, or their twisted smiles as lives are destroyed, but no Palestinian fighters, no direct Palestinian response. Instead, Palestinians and their supporters are “armed” with their cameras, committed to capturing an aftermath to which a sympathetic Western audience might choose to respond on their behalf. At the film’s start, Adra’s father, who has been imprisoned and abused by the Israelis multiple times, describes a desire to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers, then apologizes to his Israeli guest, explaining that sometimes he finds himself so angry. The woman’s son was shot at a peaceful protest.
Before the footage capturing the settler attack on Masafer Yatta, during which Adra’s cousin was shot, the producers inform the viewer through an intertitle, “We finished this film in October 2023.” The implications here are obvious, a Pandora’s box that the film, committed to the possibility of a future that accommodates both settler and native, must bend over backward not to touch.
also:
From Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd:
Take the genre of Israelis and Palestinians making films together. The Palestinian filmmaker is chaperoned to the film festival, allowed on stage as their authoritative cosignatory’s charismatic sidekick. No one—not the producer of the festival, not the columnist writing a review—seems to care about the content of the film, whether it is good or garbage. What matters most is that the film was codirected, a mode that satisfies a libidinal urge in the viewers. They eavesdrop on a forbidden conversation, a titillating reconciliation between the slayer and the slain. Discussions about the film, reviews, the way it is promoted, and our excited elevator pitches to one another all become masturbatory, reducing the film to the fact that it was a collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian, fulfilling the viewer’s fantasy of a happy ending to an otherwise miserable story. We turn it into a fetish.
Love love love characters that present themselves as emotionally open social butterflies but the more you see of them the more obvious it is that they’re the most closed off fuckers in the story. Sure, they want to help you with your personal problems and messy emotions, but if you turn that shit back on them, they’ll shut down or deflect every time. Why are you sticking your nose in their business anyway? It’s not like it matters. They’re not a person, they’re just a role being played. They’re the guy who fixes things and saves people. Please ignore the man behind the mask, he’s fine. Everything’s fine.
This might suck to hear, but if you’re a people pleaser that is motivated by praise and avoids disagreements, you are easy to manipulate.
When I was in therapy after surviving years of domestic violence, my therapist had to tell me that my personality was primed for abuse and we needed to work on that so I would be better equipped to see the red flags and respond appropriately in the future.
I’m still working on this, and it’s been 8 years. If you tell someone how you want to be treated, what behaviors you don’t tolerate in your life, what you’re looking for in that relationship, and they react negatively, don’t compromise yourself. Just move on.
This one’s for all the praise-kink girlies: differentiate, self-actualize, stay sexy
This resonated with more people than I thought, so here are some phrases to practice when you would normally default to people pleasing:
I’m not comfortable with that.
I’d rather not, but thank you for the offer!
You’re welcome to disagree, but that’s not something I’m okay with.
No.
It’s personal, and I’d prefer to keep it private.
That doesn’t work for me. How about x
I respect your opinion, but I’d rather do it my way.
That is behavior that I don’t tolerate.
To each their own.
I’m not looking for feedback right now, but if I’m looking for input later, I’ll let you know.
Oh, I’m not sure I agree; I thought x
When you did/said x, I wasn’t okay with that.
I don’t accept your apology.
I can accept your apology once you’ve addressed the problem.
Hey, could you help me with x?
I need to stop.
I need some time to myself.
Just remember, your thoughts, feelings, and opinions are what make you unique, and you can change your mind later, so don’t be afraid to say them out loud. Work through things. Don’t dodge them.
Idk exactly how to explain this but the softness of real wool and real linen is very different from the artificial softness of polyester “sherpa”, fuzzy faux-fur, spongey acrylic knits and people have gotten too used to the soft plastics and now associate wool with “itchy” and linen with rough and cotton with “too heavy” and then go and wear 100% polyester fleecy sweatshirts and say it’s so warm and cozy but actually they’re just staticky cooking in their sweat locked inside a plastic membrane and you are paying too much to be wearing filaments of petroleum products and the money isn’t going to the people sewing them either. I’m saying you all need to touch grass and the grass in this situation is good quality textiles made of natural fibres.
fuck an “intended audience” how about we normalize engaging with new and unfamiliar art pieces on their own terms
ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the difference between pushing a product and creating a work of art
I can’t be bothered to find the thread rn. But there were a bunch of people talking about it, and I agree, so I’m sharing the idea here:
We need a death of the audience; lots of media gets worse because authors are too worried about a hypothetical audience. As someone engaging with media, you need to understand that you simply might not understand all of it, and that’s ok. But also I think more authors need to realize that it’s ok if not everyone in the audience will fully understand everything they’re doing.
“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.”
I’m reading Don Quixote for my world literature class and apparently when it was first published in 1605 it was world-changingly popular, one of the first “popular novels” as we know it today, and there were all sorts of people who were writing and publishing their own unofficial fan-sequels to Don Quixote which was basically the first fan-fiction, and then in 1615 the original author wrote an official sequel in which Don Quixote reads a piece of fanfic about him and sets out on a quest to beat up the author who mischaracterized him
