The New Yorker:

“No Other Land” and “Union” are films that Hollywood and corporate America don’t want you to see.

By Doreen St. Félix

A reader comes to a piece of criticism with a basic assumption: the critic is writing about a work that the reader can eventually go and seek out herself. Reviews are premised on an ideal of access and distribution—art leaving the private realm to meet communal air. Never mind how classist or lazy or obsolete the tastes of the critic; she ought to be a conduit for the “seeing” of the thing. This has long been the nature of the critic-reader bond in America.

With “No Other Land,” a documentary directed by a collective of filmmakers—Basel Adra and Hamdan Ballal, who are Palestinian, and Rachal Szor and Yuval Abraham, who are Israeli—I write hampered, knowing that the reader may not be able to view it. The film tracks the slow demolition of Masafer Yatta, a group of Palestinian villages near Hebron, in the occupied West Bank, by the Israeli military, which in recent years tried to clear the land in order to build an Army training ground. Though the film has done the rounds on the international circuit for nearly a year, it has not been picked up for American distribution. Earlier this month, the film had a weeklong run at Lincoln Center—which allows it to qualify for next year’s Oscars—but this barely amounts to a wide release. In an interview with the Associated Press in the days leading up to the election, Abraham surmised that the fate of the film was tied to the fate of the race, that companies were hedging their bets on a revivified Trump era.

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