The global filmmaking community recently expressed outrage after Hamdan Ballal, the Oscar-winning Palestinian co-director of No Other Land, was detained by Israeli authorities amid the ongoing occupation of Gaza. Ballal was later released and claimed he was mistreated during his detention. Coincidentally, the documentary reached a domestic box office milestone shortly after the incident, despite running in theaters for over two months without proper distribution. The film’s struggle to secure studio backing has been seen as a form of soft censorship, especially given its global success.
This weekend, No Other Land surpassed $2 million at the domestic box office after securing a one-week Oscars qualifying run last year. Since its theatrical release in January, the documentary earned approximately $135,000 over the weekend. Meanwhile, another film exploring the Israel-Palestine conflict, The Encampments, set a record per-theater average with sold-out screenings at New York’s Angelika Film Center.
Advertisement Co-directed by Hamdan Ballal, Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor, No Other Land captures one Palestinian community’s struggle against erasure by Israeli settlers. Created by a team of filmmakers from both sides of the conflict, the documentary holds a rare 100% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The site’s consensus describes it as “an elegantly assembled diary of the Palestinian experience” that offers glimpses of hope for the future. In his review for Collider, Jeff Ewing called it “a heartbreaking on-the-ground look at the human cost of the Israeli government’s settlement policy that must be seen.”
After Hamdan Ballal’s detention, hundreds of Academy members, including A-list actors like Mark Ruffalo, Penélope Cruz, and Olivia Colman, criticized the Academy for omitting his name from its initial statement. In response, the Academy issued a follow-up statement acknowledging the oversight and apologizing.
We sincerely apologize to Mr Ballal and all artists who felt unsupported by our previous statement and want to make it clear that the Academy condemns violence of this kind anywhere in the world,
the revised statement read
We abhor the suppression of free speech under any circumstances. It is indefensible for an organization to recognize a film with an award in the first week of March, and then fail to defend its film-makers just a few weeks later.