A Vital Documentary About the Israeli Occupation

Basel Adra’s first memory is of Israeli soldiers raiding his house and arresting his father, a Palestinian activist who’s been fighting to preserve the small mountain community of Masafer Yatta since long before his son was born. Adra was only five years old at the time, but he can still remember the fear of that violation as if it only happened yesterday. 

In part, that’s because it did; raised in an occupied territory under Apartheid conditions, Adra has never known a life that wasn’t under threat of forced removal. But the freshness of his memory can also be attributed to the fact that Adra has never known a life that wasn’t being documented for his own protection. The most dehumanizing episodes of his existence have all been captured on camera by his family and their fellow villagers, the footage preserved and shared in the hopes that the world might witness their suffering and prevail upon Israel to let Palestinians live in peace (“I started filming when we started to end,” Adra intones, perhaps repeating the same words his father said the first time he picked up his own camera).

Against all odds, that hope continues to persevere — not only among the survivors of Masafer Yatta, but also in the raw and enraging documentary that Adra has co-directed about Israel’s decades-long attempt to erase them from the earth as completely as it erased them from its maps.

The first major film about the occupation of Palestine since the start…