The characteristic director of the West Bank, Oscar nominated, says that movies ‘can be part of the change’

A Palestinian and an Israeli sit in a town in the West Bank at night.

They wonder aloud if Basel can ever visit Yuval’s house in Israel, if Basel’s Village will obtain construction permits and if one day they will have stability.

For years, friends have been filming the destruction of houses, a well and a school by the Israeli army after a court order declared illegal to the Basel community. They say they expect that reality to change.

Now, that scene has reached some of the world’s largest stages.

The film in which it is located, no other land, has been nominated for an Oscar and a Bafta for the best documentary film.

Follow the fight for Masafer Yatta, a community of around 20 villages, and the friendship between Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham.

In the film, Basel is almost arrested after a protest, his father is arrested and a soldier shoots a member of the community in the neck while confiscating a generator, which leads to the paralysis and death of man.

“It’s scary because yes, the film is successful and people are aware of it, but I don’t think there is sufficient action, especially among those who have power to change this,” Yuval told the BBC.

“I don’t have the illusion that movies are going to change the world, but I know they can change people, and I know they can be part of a greater change, and we really need this now.”

Basel and Yuval created the film along with Hamdan Ballal and Rachel Szor for five years.

When asked about the man who was paralyzed, the IDF said that his investigation had not found any crime. A spokesman said that during an operation against the “illegal construction”, two Palestinians had grabbed a soldier for his gun and vest, which led to the shot.

Palestinian eyewitnesses He told Israeli media They were not contacted as part of the initial investigation and believed that the shot was triggered intentionally.

Israel has occupied the West Bank since 1967. Israeli agreements in the territory are considered illegal according to international law, although Israel disputes it. They have expanded in the last 55 years, becoming a focal point of violence and contradictory claims on Earth.

On October 7, 2023, Hamas attacked Israel, killing about 1,200 people and taking 251 hostages. That triggered an Israeli military campaign that has killed at least 47,500 people in Gaza, according to the Ministry of Health led by Hamas.

Since then, Violence related to settlers In the West Bank has increased, with 13 Palestinians killed by settlers, according to the UN.

More than 850 Palestinians, many of them militants, have been killed by Israeli troops in the West Bank in the same period, says the Palestinian Ministry of Health. The UN says that 30 Israelis were killed by Palestinians in the West Bank during that period.

In 2024, the UN recorded Around 1,420 incidents of the violence of Israeli settlers, the highest number that, according to the reports, led to victims, damage to property or both, since the records began in 2006.

Additional attacks had occurred against Palestinians since the return of the power of the president of the United States, Basilea, said Basel, and the filmmakers feared that it could get worse.

Trump has raised the sanctions that the Biden administration had placed in some settlers. The president’s ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, He said Israel has a “title writing” to the West Bank and “does not exist” as occupation or settlements.

When asked on Tuesday, if you agreed that the United States should recognize Israeli sovereignty about occupied Bank, Trump, Trump saying I still had to take a position, but that would make an ad in four weeks.

The debate on Masafer Yatta began in the 1980s when Israel declared that the area was a closed military shooting area, which means that no one was allowed to live there.

According Notes from a 1981 meetingThe then Israeli agricultural minister, Ariel Sharon, offered additional military training areas to restrict the “expansion of Arab villagers from the hills to the desert.”

Israel argued that residents previously did not live there permanently. The Palestinian population took its case to the Supreme Court of Israel, arguing that the communities had lived there for generations and pointing out a 1945 map that shows some villages.

In 2022, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Israel and allowed the demolition of households and the expulsion of more than 1,000 villagers.

The scenes of the film show an excavator that destroys a primary school, a truck that pours mud into a well and machinery crushing a house while the villagers confront the army.

A girl cries, and when her mother is asked if she has any other place to go, she says: “We have no other land.”

The documentary also records intimate human moments, such as when the mother, who moves to a cave, kisses her daughter and says: “You are my love … Tomorrow will be a new day.”

The film also explores the friendship of Basel and Yuval. Although they are around the same age and share similar values, their inequality is always present.

While Yuval can travel freely in Israel and the West Bank, Basel cannot travel to Israel without permission, as part of what they say are security measures.

In the film, Basel regrets that, although he studied law, he could only find work in construction in Israel, and when he thinks too much about that, “I feel this huge depression.”

The film does not shy away the tension created by Yuval’s identity, with a Palestinian asking him: “How can we remain friends, when you come here, and it could be your brother or friend who destroyed my house?”

Yuval told the BBC that he felt “responsibility for what is happening with the Basel community” because “at the end of the day, the fuel in the excavators is my tax money.”

Last year, Yuval faced a violent reaction for his acceptance speech to the Best Documenty Award at the Berlin Film Festival, along with Basilea, in which he criticized a “situation of apartheid” and asked for a stop the fire in Gaza.

The American filmmaker Ben Russell, who was there and wore a Palestinian scarf Keffiyeh, said he was against the “genocide” in Gaza. Israel strongly denies the accusation of genocide.

German Culture Minister Claudia Roth They said the statements They were “surprisingly unilateral and characterized by a deep hatred of Israel”, while the mayor of Berlin Kai Wegner Posted in Social Networks that it was an “intolerable relativization” and that “anti -Semitism does not take place in Berlin.”

Israel’s public hillside Called Yuval Anti -Semitic comments.

Yuval, who said he received death threats, told the BBC that he was “very angry” on the label, that he was “emptying this term of meaning at a time when anti -Semitism is increasing in the right wing and in the wing left”.

He said it was “absurd” to listen to criticism when most of his family was killed in the Holocaust, and added that learning from this story “should tell us that we fight against dehumanization … It doesn’t matter who the victim is.”

Despite winning several international awards, no other land is self-distributed in the United States because it has not found an official distributor there, weird for a documentary that has been nominated for an Oscar.

One of the latest scenes in the film is October 13, 2023, when Basel He recorded a settler shooting his cousin, whose hands seem empty, in the stomach. In other images, the settlers throw rocks into the houses while the soldiers observe.

The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) said the case of shooting was transferred to the state prosecutor’s office, that the BBC approached to comment.

Currently in Masafer Yatta, Basilea said the settlers have “Unlimited power” and there are A “daily harassment level”.

He said there were three main attacks of settlers in January, even in a 72 -year -old player taken to the hospital after he was beaten in the head with sticks, and around 15 people arrested in the two days before January 30 while granting their sheep or pursued the sheep of the colonists away. The Israel Police did not respond to a request for comments from the BBC.

The United Kingdom has sanctioned three advanced settlers and four organizations that, they say, support violence against the communities of the West Bank. Yuval asked the United Kingdom to sanction all settlers, believing that “would really be a deterrent.”

A spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs told the BBC that the Secretary of Foreign Affairs “has been clear with the Israeli ministers who must squeeze the violence of the settlers and finish the expansion of the settlement.”

“We have taken regular measures against the violence of the settlers, even through specific sanctions, and we will continue to do everything possible to ensure that the rights of the Palestinians are protected and that those responsible for violence are given account,” reads In the statement.

Yuval said: “I really think there is no other way to follow, apart from reaching a fair and fair political solution where Palestinians can be free, truly free, and our people, both, will have security and self -determination.

“It really angry at me, not only that my government goes in the other way, but the world is allowing it to happen for so long.”

In the film, Basel remembers a seven -minute visit from Tony Blair to his people, after which Israel canceled the demolition orders there.

“This is a story about power,” he says.

Now, Basilea obtains “strength and power of the people around me”, which does not want to surrender.

“A drop of water does not make changes,” he says during a protest in the film, “but continues to release the water and make changes.”