MAUMEE – The Israeli-Palestinian film No Other Land was shown at the Maumee Indoor Theater to a crowd of a few hundred over Memorial Day weekend.
Despite winning the 2024 Oscar for best documentary in March of 2025, no American streaming platforms or mass distribution have picked up No Other Land, forcing it into independent theaters in the United States.
This embargo on the documentary prompted the Media Decompression Collective (MDC), led by its founder Amjad Doumani, to approach the Maumee Indoor Theater to show the film, with a plan to show it again later in the summer season.
The documentary itself follows Basel Adra, a Palestinian activist, as he tries to get the world to pay attention to the Israeli settlers destroying his small Palestinian community in Masafer Yatta, in the occupied West Bank.
Doumani showed the 95-minute film, and then put together a panel to answer people’s questions after the film. The panel consisted of himself, as a Palestinian-American; Terry Lodge, a local peace activist and attorney; Mechelle Zarou, an immigration lawyer and 1st generation Palestinian-American; and Maha Zeidan, a member of the Palestinian American Bar Association with her J.D. in law from the University of Toledo.
When Doumani put together the event, he said he wanted the panel to help explain the history of what is happening between the Israeli government, Israeli settlers and Palestinians living in the occupied West Bank and Gaza, as No Other Land does not branch out beyond the small community of Masafer Yatta.
No Other Land directors at the Oscars
All four directors, two Israeli and two Palestinian, accepted their Oscars at the Academy Awards, and Yusuf Abraham, an Israeli journalist and one of the directors for the film, spoke plainly about why the team worked from 2019 to 2024 to produce the film.
“We made this film, Palestinians and Israelis, because together our voices are stronger,” Abraham said, and called for the end of the Israeli assault on Gaza and for the release of the remaining Israeli hostages.
“When I look at Basel, I see my brother, but we are unequal,” he continued. “We live in a regime where I am free under civilian law, and Basel is under military laws that destroy his life and he cannot control.”
Abraham said, “There is a different path, a political solution without ethnic supremacy, with national rights for both of our people. And I have to say as I’m here [in the U.S.] the foreign policy of this country is helping to block this path.”
“Why?” he asked. “Can’t you see that we are intertwined? That my people can be truly safe if Basel’s people are truly free and safe.”
“There is another way,” he resolved.
A brief look at settlements and settlers
Masafer Yatta is just one of many areas in the occupied West Bank, a 2,183 square mile area between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea under Israeli occupation since 1967.
After the Six Day War in 1967, the first Israeli settlement was constructed, and since then Israeli settlers have forcibly displaced Palestinians living in the West Bank in a modern day effort of ethnic cleansing. The international community has condemned these settlements as they violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, designating them as illegal.
Israeli settlers believe they are creating a buffer for Israel while decreasing the viability of a Palestinian state in the future, which they see as a threat to Israeli sovereignty. Now it is estimated there are about 700,000 settlers in the Occupied West Bank, with well over a hundred settlements, some estimate as high as 250 settlements.
No Other Land shows a rare glimpse of what the displacement of Palestinian communities looks like on the ground level.
Following the acclaim of the film, the Israeli military has barred Adra, who has attempted to lead a press tour into Masafer Yatta.
After viewing the film at the Maumee Indoor Theater, members of the public came out of the theater with glazed looks of astonishment, including Mike Strom, a Jewish-American, who reactively said to the Toledo Free Press at the beginning of an interview, “Hello, my name’s Mike, and I just watched a movie. And it made me sad,” before expounding more in the YouTube video.
