We were moved to tears last Sunday when No Other Land won the Oscar for Best Documentary Feature Film. This is a historic win: No Other Land is the first Palestinian film to win an Oscar.

No Other Land wins Oscar for Best Documentary Film

A film by Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal & Yuval Abraham.

Made by a four-person collective of Israeli and Palestinian activists, this unflinching, prize-winning documentary depicts the harrowing conditions of a mountain village living under constant violence. For half a decade, Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist, films his community of Masafer Yatta being destroyed by Israel’s occupation, as he builds an unlikely alliance with a journalist from the other side who joins his fight.

This historical Oscar win is the latest of the many awards No Other Land has received, including the 2025 Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary, the 2024 IDA Award for Best Feature Documentary, and the Jury Prize and the Audience Award for Best Documentary at the 2024 Berlin Film Festival.

No Other Land was also the Highest Rated Documentary on Letterboxd in 2024.

It’s incredible that No Other Land is still without a U.S. distributor, this despite being the top grossing Best Documentary nominee, according to IndieWire. We co-presented No Other Land at last year’s SFFILM Doc Stories with the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, and we hope the film reaches a much wider audience.