No Other Land

Made by a Palestinian-Israeli collective, NO OTHER LAND (2024, 95 min) shows with heartbreaking clarity both the destruction of the occupied West Bank's Masafer Yatta by Israeli soldiers & settlers, and the ongoing resistance to occupation by the communities of Masafer Yatta. Although it won the 2025 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and has been screened and acclaimed at festivals around the world, it has yet to find a wider audience. 

In this class, we’ll explore the film as a means of bearing witness to the history and present of Israel’s occupation of Palestine, and contextualizing the film through its impact, its struggle to be seen, and a range of both celebration & critiques by Palestinians in Masafer Yatta and beyond. 

We will also expand our conversation to discuss cinema’s capacity to generate embodied empathy and the immense power of documentary storytelling as a historical and contemporary tool for understanding experiences that are not our own.

This class will be taught by MMU Instructor Max Swanson, a filmmaker/performer, writer, educator, and organizer based in Portland, OR. They currently also teach at NW Doc and PSU, and work as a freelance story consultant.

Class size will be limited to 18.

Questions? Email us at education@moviemadness.org