Name: Film Screening: No Other Land
Start: 2025-11-13T17:45:00-08:00
Location: Denman Island Community Hall

5:45 p.m. Simple Soup Dinner
6:30 p.m. talk by Sara Kishawi
7:00 p.m. Film: No Other Land
The event is by donation and funds raised from this event will be donated to important causes in Gaza. You are welcome to join any or all parts of the evening.
Sara Kishawi will share her reflections on the current context in Gaza. Originally from Gaza City, Sara is a key organizer in the Palestine solidarity movement in Nanaimo. She is also one of two Palestinian Muslim students that Vancouver Island University (VIU) chose to discipline and suspend in 2024, following their involvement in the longest running university solidarity encampment in Canada. Sara’s activism on campus included putting up unauthorized posters and organizing sit-ins, and led to her being suspended retroactively.
No Other Land won an Oscar for best documentrary in 2024. The co-director Basel Adra has been documenting the expulsion and decimation of his community in the small mountain village of Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank since childhood. Adra’s early memories as a child are plagued with images of Israeli soldiers raiding his home, witnessing his father Nasser, a Palestinian activist, being arrested, and the ongoing Israeli military occupation and settler aggression. By picking up his camera, Adra has tirelessly documented this reality of impending forced removals, bulldozers destroying homes, and the violence that inevitably follows. The film takes place prior to October 7, 2023, when attention to the region was in shorter supply.
During Adra’s fight to preserve his mountain village community, he forms an unexpected friendship and alliance with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who joins his resistance efforts. It is clear this bond is not one grounded in equity, with Adra living under occupation and Abraham’s freedom of movement. Yet the relationship that develops between the two — showing deep care, humanity, and above all how solidarity can break down barriers, even during occupation — is at the heart of this piece.
Film co-director - Hamdan Ballal - was in the headlines following the Oscar win in March 2025 following his forcible disappearance from his home in the occupied West Bank village of Susiya by Israeli soldiers, after he was assaulted by Israeli settlers attacking Palestinians. Ballal was subsequently released but no one has been held accountable. The film production team reports that there has been a massive upswing in attacks by settlers and Israeli forces in the area since the Oscar win