Head over to Auditorium Three at the Laemmle Theater’s Monica Film Center in downtown Santa Monica one afternoon this week and you’ll catch a screening No Other Land, the Oscar-winning documentary about the Israeli government’s efforts to evict Palestinians from the southern West Bank community of Masafer Yatta with a decidedly negative view of the Israel Defense Forces.
Stick around after the closing credits for the next showtime, though, and a rather different movie will come up: October 8, the newly released film about the Hamas massacre in southern Israel on October 7, 2023 and Jewish students bullied on American campuses with a decidedly negative view of the academic left.
The screening-room convergence offers a concrete example of what is fast becoming a kind of cinematic ballot box: Two documentaries mainstream Hollywood wouldn’t touch, each becoming hits with sharply different views and audiences.
“We believe that all kinds of films need to be put out into the marketplace,” Laemmle owner and president Greg Laemmle told The Hollywood Reporter, explaining the decision to screen both movies. “The public can inform themselves about what’s out there and hopefully learn more about what’s going on in the world by seeing these films.”
A low-key battle has been shaping up at movie theaters from indie to chain, coast to coast, this early spring. And while it’s hardly Fahrenheit 9/11 vs. The Passion of the Christ — the great blockbuster-as-ideological-marker from that distant era of 2004 — it offers its own spin on the dynamic. Scores of pro-Jewish and pro-Israel filmgoers have been pouring into October 8, while many who align with Palestinians have turned out for the Oscar winner. No Other Land and October 8 is the film world’s successful attempt, despite Big Hollywood’s every effort to stay away, to litigate the defining geopolitical and social issue of our moment.
The popularity of the films — which collectively have sold some 250,000 tickets and show little sign of slowing down — suggest a hunger for content about the Middle East. But the two films’ appeal to disparate audiences worry experts and even one of the movie’s makers, who say the rivalry offers one more example of a culture gone fractured. To the “Team”-centric questions of what influencers you follow, what news you watch, what pins you wear and what positions you argue, you can now add a filmic binary: which Middle East documentary you’ll turn out for and which you’d never step foot in.
“It would be great if we were getting a lot of crossover, but I don’t know that we are,” Wendy Sachs, director of October 8, tells THR. “The reality is if you’re fascinated by No Other Land you’re probably not fascinated by October 8, and vice versa.”
Both films are well-told chronicles that could leave viewers rapt and enraged. It just so happens they’ll leave different sets of viewers rapt and enraged.
No Other Land — directed by a quartet that includes the Palestinian West Bank residents Hamdan Ballal and Basel Adra and the Israeli peace activists Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor — has been winning awards since its debut at the Berlinale last year for its searing look at residents of a Palestinian community steadily pushed out of their homes by the Israeli government after a long legal battle. Providing emotional ballast is Adra, whose plight puts a human face on an abstract conflict.
But amid the hothouse of Middle Eastern politics, no stateside distributor would buy the movie. So filmmakers have put No Other Land in American theaters themselves, enlisting the marketing help of the New York-based Cinetic Media and an indie exhibition consultant named Michael Tuckman. After an opening in late January in one New York theater timed to Oscar nominations, the film expanded to 100 screens Oscar weekend and has continued to maintain steam weeks after the ceremony. Last weekend marked its biggest gross since all but the weekend right after the Oscars.
The movie is set to cross $2 million this weekend, or about 170,000 tickets sold — rare for any doc in the 2020’s, let alone one that featured, per a Cinetic source, “not a single ad taken out on its behalf.” (The perils of self-releasing.)
A Cinetic spokeswoman said all four of the filmmakers were living or spending a lot of time in the West Bank and were not available to speak to the press (Adra and Abraham’s Oscar speeches remain the group’s abiding image). The movie is still seeking a television or streaming deal in the United States. Jason Ishikawa, the rep at Cinetic’s sales arm who is handling sales of the film, did not reply to a request seeking comment.
No Other Land has benefitted from a stream of news events boosting its profile. Miami Beach mayor Steven Meiner attempted unscuccessfully to evict a theater showing No Other Land from city-owned property last week, generating headlines around the country. And on Tuesday Abraham said that his co-director Ballal was assaulted by Israeli settlers outside his home and then detained by soldiers when he tried to seek treatment in an ambulance. The IDF says Palestinian terrorists initiated the encounter. (For an account of the incident from a peace activist in the region, you can read THR‘s story here.) The very reason that big Hollywood companies have resisted these movies — their inability to stay out of the headlines — is exactly what’s fueling their popularity.
Tuckman says even the team behind the film has been startled by the business it’s done. “This has exceeded everyone’s wildest expectations,” he says.
An equally unlikely path has unfolded before October 8. The movie uses the October 7 massacre of Israelis as a jumping off point to explore the 18 months of antisemitic and anti-Zionist actions that have followed on college campuses and beyond — those standing up to it and those responsible for it. Featuring a host of academics, politicians, student leaders and celebrities (Debra Messing is an executive producer), the film argues that Hamas has been seeding antisemitic efforts in the United States going back more than 30 years.
Made entirely with donations solicited by producer Teddy Schwarzman and Sachs — she previously made a movie about feminist Democratic Congressional candidates — the doc ran into the same walls as No Other Land. It couldn’t find a home with any studio or streamer, and was even turned down by every sales agent. In stepped Tom Ortenberg of theatrical distributor Briarcliff Entertainment, who in the past few years has scooped up a host of homeless films such as The Apprentice and the Jamal Khashoggi doc The Dissident.
Now October 8 has become a grassroots sensation in its own right, currently showing on about 100 screens, including outlets of major chains AMC and Regal. On Thursday, its 13th day of release, the film will cross $1 million at the box office — a number that, in the post-pandemic era, almost no issue-oriented documentary reaches in any timeframe (except No Other Land).
Buying a ticket to Sachs’ film has become a form of political expression for the many Jews who feel the inciting atrocities of October 7 have been too easily forgotten and that American culture and media has not done enough to speak out against antisemitism. Members of pro-Jewish and pro-Israel communities in the U.S. have turned out in droves for the movie, with synagogues in New York, Los Angeles and other big cities convening groups for a communal experience.
“The Jewish community is to a large degree both plagued by and benefits from the assumption that it is larger than it is,” says Dov Lerner, a philosophy professor at Yeshiva University and the rabbi of the Young Israel of Jamaica Estates in Queens, NY, which identifies as a pro-Israel Modern Orthodox congregation. “One way to do that is to turn out for events like this and show studios that we are engaged and that we matter,” he says, equating film attendance to voting in high numbers to communicate a demographic’s power to elected officials.
Lerner’s synagogue is arranging a trip to a local theater to see October 8 on Thursday night, he says, and some 40 people have already bought tickets.
The film, he believes, will also meet congregants’ personal needs. “People in our community right now are looking for validation, and explanation,” he adds.
Like No Other Land, October 8 has gained a burst of timeliness from news events, as Columbia University strikes a deal with the Trump administration to more strictly police the kind of antisemitic campus incidents depicted in October 8.
And somehow both movies have benefited from the blizzard of news around the ICE arrest of Columbia encampments leader Mahmoud Khalil, which to No Other Land devotees represents exactly the kind of injustice Palestinians face in the film, while to October 8 fans provides an example of precisely the kind of action that authority figures in the U.S need to take more often, though a certain percentage of pro-Israel Americans also disagree with the move.
The idea of nonfiction films so aggressively taking sides marks a departure of sorts. Where many documentary films once investigated all sides of a complex issue — the gold standard might be 2006’s Lake of Fire, Tony Kaye’s 360-degree view of abortion in America — some observers have noted that, like many current documentaries, neither No Other Land nor October 8 even has that as its ambition. Both sets of filmmakers come to argue with passion, not explore with detachment.
“The funny thing is If you watched both films you’d actually get a pretty comprehensive view of the situation,” says one veteran studio executive who asked not to be identified because they had not been authorized to speak to the media. “But of course how many people are watching both films?”
To buy a movie ticket more as salve than educational opportunity is both an understandable and concerning trend to Thom Powers, a prominent documentary programmer at TIFF and DOC NYC.
“Every week in this country, no matter your ideology, you’re acutely aware more than ever before that 50 percent of people don’t agree with you,” Powers says. “It’s isolating. So to sit in a movie theater and get 90 minutes of ideas and people that you agree with makes you feel a little less lonely.”
Powers adds, “These movies can bring the same comforts that someone who feels a lack of love might get watching a romantic movie — it feeds something that’s missing in your life.”
In theory, of course, it’s possible both documentaries get it right; each community has plenty of victims. In practice — at least the 2025-era practice of side-choosing and nuance-trashing — it doesn’t work that way.
Lest you think the battle touched off by the two movies will end soon at the box office, think again. This weekend another Middle East-themed documentary opens. It’s called The Encampments and is produced by strident self-proclaimed anti-Zionist Macklemore. As October 8 and its stories of pro-Zionist Columbia students who stood up to bullying on campus continues to play in theaters, The Encampments, according to press materials, is “a groundbreaking documentary that chronicles the Columbia University Gaza Solidarity Encampment and the international wave of student activism it ignited.”
Ryan Gajewski contributed to this report.
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