The Oscar-nominated film-makers behind the documentary No Other Land have expressed shock and dismay over Donald Trump’s Gaza plan.
The president has called for the US to take control and bring an effective ethnic cleansing of Gaza giving Palestinians “no alternative” but to leave. He has claimed it would be a “real estate development for the future”, saying Gaza could be “the Riviera of the Middle East”.
His comments have sparked an immediate backlash around the world, with more than 350 rabbis and members of the entertainment industry signing a letter condemning the plan and now, talking to Deadline, the directors of a film about violence and displacement in the West Bank have spoken out.
The Israeli film-maker Yuval Abraham and Palestinian film-maker Basel Adra have said that Trump’s words amount to him “ethnically cleansing Gaza … It is so irresponsible, it’s so immoral.”
Adra called it “shocking” and “a stupid thing to say” before adding: “It’s insane and a crazy thing. And he’s just saying things from a perspective of power, that he feels there are no consequences for his words and his actions. And he can do whatever he wants, and he can say whatever he wants.”
Abraham added: “Transferring Israeli population into occupied territories in the West Bank is illegal. And then transferring out Palestinians from the occupied territories as is happening in Masafer Yatta, as Trump wants to accelerate in Gaza, is also illegal.”
The plan has also been rejected by Jordan’s King Abdullah II.
“We’ll have lots of good things built there, including hotels and office buildings and housing and other things and we’ll make that into what it should be,” Trump said to reporters this week.
No Other Land premiered at the Berlin film festival last year where it won the Berlinale documentary award. The film was made between 2019 and 2023 by an Israeli-Palestinian collective and focuses on the steady forced displacement of Palestinians from their homes in Masafer Yatta, a region in the occupied West Bank targeted by Israeli forces.
Despite acclaim, the film could not find distribution in the US but was nominated for the best documentary Oscar. The Guardian’s Adrian Horton called it “straightforward, un-sensationalized and completely infuriating” in a five-star review.
“I believe it’s clear that it’s for political reasons,” Abraham told Deadline about the lack of formal distribution. “I hope that it will change. We basically decided not to wait on the theatrical release because the demand in the United States is now so high for the film, and we are now releasing it in almost 100 theaters independently. And we’re seeing everything is sold out.”
Since the Hamas attack on 7 October, Israeli forces have killed at least 48,200 Palestinians while forcibly displacing 2 million survivors.
