‘A chilling effect’: is Hollywood too scared to touch hot-button documentaries?
This Sunday could see West Bank-set documentary No Other Land win an Oscar but it remains without US distribution, one of many challenging films facing problems
The Oscars are far from a consensus, but few films head into Sunday’s awards with as much critical acclaim as No Other Land, a documentary chronicling the destruction of the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta by the Israeli military, which seeks to expel families from their land to make way for a military training base. The film, made by an Israeli-Palestinian collective, garnered numerous festival accolades, several independent awards and nearly every American critics association’s “best of” title. But the vast majority of Americans cannot view it.
For months, even after No Other Land secured an Oscar nomination, no major US distributor bought the project, stranding the film in a strange limbo – high visibility, at least in the film world, but almost no access to audiences. At a time when studios and streamers are typically boasting their Oscar bona fides, no company has been willing to touch it. “We were told that people were afraid” of distributing a film critical of the Israeli government during the war with Gaza, said Yuval Abraham, the film’s co-director, even though No Other Land filmed in the West Bank and wrapped before the attacks of 7 October 2023. (For transparency, Abraham has previously written for the Guardian.) “Some of them said: ‘If we take this film, we will have to balance it with another film.’”
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