Among the shortlisted nominees for the Best Documentary Feature category at the upcoming Oscars, two films focus on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Naturally, the relatively weak public visibility of documentaries in general makes it challenging for these works to break through into the mainstream consciousness of Hollywood and the commercial film industry. Meanwhile, the intense warfare between Israel and Palestine and geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East have persisted for over a year, leading to the emergence of various related films across different genres, coinciding with typical production cycles.
The two shortlisted films are No Other Land and The Bibi Files.
No Other Land premiered on February 25, 2024, at the Berlin International Film Festival, where it won the Panorama Audience Award for Best Documentary Film and the Berlinale Documentary Film Award. Subsequently, over the past year, it continued to garner significant accolades at major film festivals worldwide. The close proximity between its premiere date and October 7, 2023, the very day when the Palestinian militant group, Hamas, launched Operation Al-Aqsa Flood in Israel that triggered a new wave of large-scale conflict, clearly marked it as a project unrelated to the immediate stories and individuals involved in the ongoing violence. In fact, this film was collectively created by four Palestinian and Israeli activists and turns its lens on the villages in Masafer Yatta, West Bank. The Israeli military has persistently sought to evict the local Palestinian residents in the area to make way for new Jewish settlements.
The crew rooted themselves in these villages from 2019 to 2023, documenting the evictions carried out by the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) as well as the residents’ resistance. The story follows two central figures: Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham. Through their lives, their resistance against the IDF, the friendship and disputes between the two, as well as their eventual despair about the forced evictions, the film captures the cost of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Shortly after Operation Al-Aqsa Flood, the IDF retaliated with wrathful vengeance, abandoning the moral constraints they had previously maintained to some extent. They swiftly destroyed the villages and forcibly displaced the Palestinian residents.
Both the displaced residents, including Adra and the film crew, accumulated a wealth of critical material over those five years. Although the IDF broke into their quarters twice, confiscating computers and cameras, at that time, Israel still cared somewhat about its image and was reluctant to be portrayed as outright plunderers in a documentary. However, in the past year, as Gaza was relentlessly flattened through airstrikes and ground offensives, the broker-like IDF came in wielding Bibles as land deeds morphed into bloodthirsty butchers. They no longer feared being portrayed as executioners; some soldiers even went to the battlefield armed with smartphones, broadcasting and boasting about their acts of brutal slaughter. Of course, this unrestrained violence also left some soldiers with severe psychological trauma, leading to a rising wave of suicides.
I had previously written an article on this subject for the My Animated Hero writing challenge. Using the animated documentary Waltz with Bashir as an example, I titled the piece They Were Merely Massacred, but I Was Left with Psychological Trauma!
The Bibi Files delves deeper into issues that feel like internal Israeli affairs. In 2023, American filmmaker Alex Gibney obtained a trove of footage from 2016 to 2018 of interrogations conducted by Israeli police on the country’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his wife, Sara, regarding allegations of bribery and fraud. The source of these sensitive materials was Israeli investigative journalist Raviv Drucker, who shared it with Gibney via the highly secure, open-source encrypted messaging app Signal. The documentary, however, was directed by South African female filmmaker Alexis Bloom, who crafted a hard-hitting, accusatory work. It builds on the wealth of the interrogation footage, interwoven with extensive interviews with key individuals involved in the case.
The target of these allegations is, of course, Netanyahu, who is informally known as “Bibi” and Israel’s longest-serving prime minister since its founding in 1948. The film had its first public screening as a W.I.P. (work-in-progress) project during the Toronto International Film Festival on September 9, 2024. It then had its world premiere at the New York Documentary Film Festival on November 14. In the interim, Netanyahu’s legal representatives filed charges against Drucker for leaking the interrogation footage, requesting an injunction from the Jerusalem District Court. However, their request was denied by the presiding judge.
It seems that even the notoriously dominant and assertive Netanyahu, both in domestic and foreign affairs, is powerless against such a cross-border collaborative documentary. But what exactly has allowed Netanyahu and his wife to evade conviction despite damning evidence of bribery, retain their grip on power, and, in defiance of overwhelming international condemnation, conduct genocidal operations in Gaza with impunity?
Through the interrogation footage and corroborating interviews with various individuals, the film reveals key factors behind the political resilience of Netanyahu’s government. His astonishing memory and shameless confidence during the interrogations, the commanding role Sara holds in their relationship and his strategic alliance with far-right factions under the guise of safeguarding national security have all contributed to making him untouchable for both domestic and international opposition forces.
Even survivors of the October 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel accuse Netanyahu of being the true culprit behind it. Over the years, he has funneled resources to Hamas in Gaza through wealthy Qatar by leveraging his power to deliberately undermine the influence of the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank. Confident in his ability to “control the height of the flames,” he used the ongoing conflict between Israel and Hamas as an excuse to repeatedly delay judicial proceedings related to his corruption cases. As a fan of The Godfather, Netanyahu even cited the iconic line from the film during his interrogations: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”
Watching The Bibi Files provides a clearer understanding of why Israel, equipped with advanced technology, formidable military power and unwavering support from the United States, continues to act with such impunity as the regional bully of the Middle East. What difference, then, can a few documentaries make?
The transformation of victims into perpetrators and the once-idealistic dragon-slaying youths into dragons themselves is an inevitable and brutal historical process.
In addition to documentaries, another film that gained some international attention through the festival circuit is Cabaret Total, a narrative feature that premiered in Israel in August last year. The film marks actor Roy Assaf’s debut as a director. Written in 2017 and completed in 2021, the story centers on an unsuccessful amateur theater enthusiast who directs a high school graduation play in a small town after having just returned from the battlefield. His remark mocking the idea of Israel’s “nation of soldiers” is recorded by a student and posted on social media, sparking online harassment and a nationwide controversy.
According to Assaf, the film serves two purposes: to express his deep desire to create theatrical art and to examine the complexities of his homeland. The director’s criticism of the Israeli government and military, as well as the education system’s Zionist-style indoctrination of students, is evident throughout the narrative. The play (staged by the protagonist) that gets him into trouble—a clichéd story of a young man enlisting in the army and a tearful girl bidding him farewell—is a deliberate critique. By the film’s conclusion, this theme is beautifully echoed in a scene featuring fireworks on a quiet evening. Due to the protagonist’s defiance of the oppressive state, his exasperated wife is forced to flee to Paris with their child. Against the backdrop of the students’ graduation play, she repeats the same banal farewell lines.
Another notable work is Palestinian director Kamal Aljafari’s experimental work A Fidai Film. The film’s primary material comes from archives once held by the Palestinian Research Center, which was looted in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. These archives included invaluable footage documenting the multiple wars between Israel and Lebanon and life in the Beirut refugee camps. Rather than reassembling the footage into a coherent historical narrative or providing context for individual clips, Aljafari allows the fragments to speak for themselves, only briefly referencing a bombing in Beirut’s city center, allegedly carried out by the Israeli-backed Christian Phalangist militia.
There are two sets of intertextual subtitles, possibly added by the filmmaker or another narrator. The first appears during the segment about the bombing, where the narrator recalls his ears temporarily going deaf and being taken to the hospital at his secretary’s request. The second appears near the film’s end, where the same narrator describes traveling back to Haifa via Tel Aviv and suddenly feeling mute.
The themes of loss of voice and silence resonate deeply with Palestine’s historical and current realities. This experimental documentary aims to reclaim and restore stolen Palestinian historical records. It is also a profound exploration of Palestinian identity, memory and resistance.
Share your thoughts!
Be the first to start the conversation.