Breathe
By Cristina Gutiérrez
The film "No Other Land", winner of the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature at the last edition of the awards, is a Palestinian-Israeli project that for half a decade chronicles the systematic destruction of Masafer Yatta, a community made up of several Palestinian villages in the West Bank. Palestinian activist Basel Adra, supported by Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, documents the constant demolition of homes and the consequent forced displacement of their inhabitants by the Israeli army to build a military training camp on the land.
The film documents for just over 90 minutes the daily life of this community that, like many others in the West Bank, has suffered the atrocities of the Israeli occupation since 1967. It not only presents with overwhelming clarity the destruction of homes and schools and the forced eviction to which the population is subjected, but also connects us with the pain of these people who overnight lose everything they have built and are expelled, becoming foreigners in their own land. The documentary connects us with the fear and desolation of a people whose only way to resist is by participating in the peaceful protests that are periodically organized in the region, even knowing that in many cases these protests end in arrests and tear gas attacks by the Israeli army. In the narrator's words, "they destroy us slowly, every week a house, every week a family has to decide between resisting or leaving their land. Most decide to resist, Masafer Yatta exists because they are people who cling to life."
