Berlinale Head Voices Support For ‘No Other Land’ Filmmakers After Berlin City Portal Says Film Contains “Antisemitic Tendencies”: “That Discourse Creates Danger For All Of Them”

Berlinale director Tricia Tuttle has voiced support for the festival’s 2024 Best Documentary winner No Other Land and dismissed suggestions that comments made by co-directors Yuval Abraham and Basel Adra at the awards ceremony were antisemitic.

The festival posted the message from Tuttle on its Instagram account as the film begins its theatrical release in Germany, which has reignited local debate around whether the filmmakers and their work are antisemitic.

“No Other Land won the Berlinale Documentary Award, and also the Panorama Audience Award in February 2024. Israeli/Palestinian directing collective Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor have crafted a frank, incisive, powerful film which is deservedly gaining acclaim and picking up many awards and nominations around the world,” Tuttle was quoted as saying in the statement.

 

“In the last days there has been renewed discussion around No Other Land and the Berlinale, and I want to be clear that I don’t consider the film, or statements made by co-directors, Palestinian Basel Adra and Israeli Yuval Abraham at the Awards Ceremony of the Berlinale to be anti-Semitic. I also believe that discourse which suggests this film or its filmmakers are anti-Semitic creates danger for all of them, inside and outside of Germany, and it is important that we stand together and support them. We wish the filmmakers and their distributor a strong opening weekend for this film”.

The co-directors – whose film documents the destruction of Palestinian villages in the West Bank by Israel – were publicly accused of antisemitism by Berlin’s mayor last February after Abraham criticized a “situation of apartheid” in Israel and called for a ceasefire in Gaza in his acceptance speech.

Abraham later reported that he had received death threats and that a right-wing mob had turned up at his home in Israel, in the wake of the comments by the German officials which were then picked up by Israeli media.

Since then, the film has successfully toured a raft of festivals and picked up close to 30 awards, with little discussion of what happened in Germany, with most interviews and articles focusing instead on the film’s depiction of Israeli violence against Palestinian villages in the West Bank area of Masafer Yatta.

The debate around the film has reignited in Germany this week after the city of Berlin’s official online portal posted a description of the film saying it had “anti-Semitic tendencies”.

Abraham flagged the description in a post on X saying: “It pains me to see how, after murdering most of my family in the holocaust, you empty the word antisemitism of meaning to silence critics of Israel’s occupation in the West Bank (the topic of our film) and legitimize violence against Palestinians. I feel unsafe and unwelcome in Berlin of 2024 as a left-wing Israeli and will take legal action.”

The post was taken down a few hours later but not before the debate around the film and the co-directors’s comments at the awards ceremony had reignited.