Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
Harvest and No Other Land, showing at New York Film Festival 2024, concern struggles with land possession and ownership that divergently reveal how money, greed and power become the salient motivation for evicting people who have worked the land for a century or more, rendering them homeless.
Harvest
Athina Rachel Tsangari’s fictional Harvest, adapted from the acclaimed novel by British writer Jim Crace, takes place in a remote village in medieval England. This atmospheric, lustrously cinematic and sensual film of browns, oranges, firelight shadows and dark woodsy greens conveys a feeling of beauty coupled with impending doom that suggests the village’s abundance will end.
Scenic realism gives the viewer a glimpse into feudalism, with effete land owners and rough-hewn peasant farmers. Caleb Landry Jones stars as Walter Thirsk, the former childhood friend and manservant of the village’s passive landowner, Master Kent (Harry Melling). Close, almost like brothers, Thirsk lived for a time with Kent and was educated to read and write, unlike his illiterate village kinsfolk.
The overlong, dialogue-sparse narrative is a simplistic parable envisioned through the eyes and poetic commentary of narrator Thirsk. Initially, the director engages us by showing Thirsk’s artistic sensibility. He deeply appreciates the beauty of the rolling hills, woodlands, and creatures who inhabit and sustain the fertile lands. However, his passive, pacific nature, like his master’s, contributes to the downfall of the once prosperous close-knit, tribal farming community that abides together like a family.
When a fire breaks out the ensuing chaos erupts into a series of cascading events from which the townspeople never recover. The key issue is that Thirsk knows who set the fire but is quiet. His silence, viewed as complicity by the arsonists, allows the townspeople to let the blame fall on three outsiders whom they accuse of theft, and from whom they seek a confession of arson. They punish the two men, who must remain in the stocks for a week exposed to the wind and rain, and shame the wife of one of the men by cutting her beautiful long hair. But when they let her wander the nearby hills she performs mischief by witchcraft while the two men suffer exposure, thirst and hunger. All three outsiders curse the village and refuse any help Thirsk kindly offers them.
When Kent’s autocratic cousin takes authority over the land after sending a mapmaker to establish boundaries, the situation blows up. The cousin emasculates Kent and takes charge. He explains he will live in the city and appoint overseers to milk the land and earn huge profits. His colonial indifference and ignorance of the importance of letting the farmers maintain the land’s agricultural and environmental integrity recalls how greedy, genocidal colonialists in the Americas destroyed the culture and healing wisdom of generations of Indigenous people, and nearly rendered the buffalo extinct in their rapacious greed and love of “the hunt.”
Importantly, we are reminded of the continuation of this process by agricultural conglomerates that today despoil the land with pesticides, herbicides, etc., and taint the livestock with antibiotics, growth hormones and bio-engineering which devalue the nutrition of the food, all for increased profits.
As has happened for millennia, those without money or power are evicted by the wealthy with no recompense. We see the villagers leave with a few possessions and their lives, as Thirsk plants seeds for a future harvest, burns the village in a metaphoric and apocalyptic vision of the future, and makes a signature gesture that he is bound to the land forever.
Unfortunately, Tsangari’s narrative, while thematically rich and cinematicaly reminiscent of Pieter Breugel’s glorious paintings, needs an edit. A concise narrative that rambles less would strengthen the nuanced themes and loudly illuminate the self-destructive impulses of fascism, selfishness and autocracy to reveal what happens when good people stand by and do nothing.
No Other Land
No Other Land is a documentary that highlights the present dire circumstances in the Israeli West Bank. Its profound scenes are superbly edited and executed, written, directed and produced in cinema verité style with maximum effect by Basel Adra, Hamadan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor.
The filmmakers are part of a Palestinian-Israeli collective that seeks to bring worldwide public attention to the injustices leveled against the Palestinians by the Israeli military tasked with demolishing Palestinian homes. The film poignantly, factually reveals the alliance that develops between Palestinian activist Adra and Israeli journalist Abraham. Holding similar themes and messages as the fictional Harvest, No Other Land astounds with its raw and visceral portrait of families under siege.
The documentary is a manifestation of the parable of Harvest come to horrid life in Masafer Yatta, once a peaceful Palestinian farming community of about 20 villages in the West Bank. There, families lived since the 1850s herding their sheep and raising chickens. After the Israeli occupation, which has produced what the international community has come to see as an apartheid system and some see as genocide of Palestinians, the villages, which existed on the British maps of Palestine, have been removed on maps of Israel. According to the Israeli government, Palestinians have no right to live or exist. Hiring lawyers in 2000, activists (Basel and the Adra family and others) fought a two-decade court battle to stay in their homes.
In 2022, the Israeli high court decreed that the military could bulldoze homes and evict Palestinians in the largest single act of forced transfer carried out in the West Bank since it was occupied in 1967. The Israeli military’s brutal actions in the area and elsewhere have gradually turned many Israelis who support a democratic Israel against the increasingly conservative, uber-right-wing government. Especially after the court’s ruling and the demolitions, many Israelis believe this attempt to crush the Palestinians in the region will only foment more hatred and dire security risks for Israelis and Palestinians alike.
Though the film doesn’t go into the politics of the situation except in brief voiceover explanations, the strident, violent divisions have become especially trenchant after the radical right-wing assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in the 1990s. Rabin advocated for a two-state solution, anathema to the subsequent conservative governments. Increasingly, the ultra conservatives, especially during the 16-year leadership of Bebe Netanyahu, undergirded by radical right-wing rabbis, have allowed settlers to build on former Palestinian land.
Meanwhile the military, by government decree, prevents West Bank Palestinians from rebuilding on the land that was theirs, despite their birthright. In the distance the filmmakers show the stark contrast between the Palestinians of Masafer Yatta who live in caves and out in the open in makeshift areas surrounded by rubble, and the twinkling lights of the settlers in the distant hills. The Israeli government has allowed settlers to build lovely homes and supplies their settlements with water, electricity, etc.
We learn of the struggle of those who live in the villages of Masafer Yatta. Basel Adra, at three years old in 1999, was ordered with his parents and siblings to leave so the military could use the land as a “training ground.” It eventually is revealed that the law forcing expulsion off the land “for military use” was a fraud used as a justification for the evictions and expulsions to make way for Israeli settlements.
No Other Land is an incredibly human film that lays bare the injustice of the laws against the Palestinians and the brutality of the Israeli military, which impassively and forcefully bulldozes houses, evicts people, poisons and seals up water wells, and essentially renders extinct the Palestinians who live in various villages slated for demolitions. The documentarians chronicle the actions of Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham as they film the evictions and their traumatic impact on Palestinian families, women and children who ask the military, “Would you like someone to come in and destroy your home?”
Adra and his family of activists have been taking a stand against the Israeli military’s unjust behaviors for two decades. We meet his father and see archived video clips of him and his mother years prior, standing up to the military. In interviews, we learn how his father, who owns a gas station, has been arrested countless times for protesting. Additionally, the film shows him being arrested as an older man, as son Basel and the family stress about whether his father will be released or harmed.
Regardless of the injustice, the Palestinians stay and attempt to live in the surrounding caves and rebuild their homes at night, forcing the military to return for demolitions again and again. As this process continues, Adra and Abraham film and upload video clips to social media to record what they are going through on a basic human level. The filmmakers concentrate, not on politics, but on the needs of human beings to stay in their homes and sustain their rights to water, shelter and life.
Throughout, the film gives the historical context of the evictions through flashbacks, voiceovers, archived news clips past and present, and ongoing scenes of dislocation, arrests, and destruction of lives and families. This is a masterful film that sheds important light on the ongoing circumstances in the West Bank, which along with Israel’s excesses in its war against Hamas in Gaza has been condemned internationally.
The film shows protests, some with violent ends. For example Harun, an activist, is shot and paralyzed. He is brought back from the hospital and lives suffering with his wounds in a cave, as his mother prays for him to die to end his terrible pain. The military’s increasing ferocious actions have been deemed war crimes by the Hague.
Clearly, the international community and a majority of Israeli citizens, especially the youth, have condemned what has been happening in Masafer Yatta, but the Israeli right-wing government has been intractable and recalcitrant. Egged on by the government, the West Bank settlers have grown violent and attacked and shot at Palestinians who attempt to stay on their land and rebuild their homes. Adra and the others know that if they leave, any rights that they still have, despite the Israeli government’s fraud, will be eliminated. So, as he says, “I hope, I hope.”
The destruction of the villages of Masafer Yatta and the expulsions of farmers appear to be a policy of genocide that has no firm, rational grounds except to establish an area where the right-wing Jewish settlers can build. The courageous documentarians, at great risk to their lives, reveal the extent to which the colonial, power-hungry, feudal attitudes represented by the landowner in the medieval times of Harvest are mirrored in the Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands. However, whereas in Harvest, nothing could be done, the Israeli government has received the condemnation of the international community. The forced expulsions are a violation of the Geneva Convention. Along with the war in Gaza the military’s actions have been designated by the Hague as war crimes.
Tickets to Harvest and No Other Land are available online.
