Oscar-winning Palestinian filmmaker Hamdan Ballal on Tuesday made headlines after he was allegedly attacked by a group of Israeli settlers close to his home in Susiya village of Palestine and subsequently detained by Israeli forces.
Hailing from Susya in Palestine’s West Bank, 36-year-old Ballal is a filmmaker, activist and human rights defender. His documentary No Other Land bagged an Oscar in the Best Documentary (feature) category at the 97th Academy Awards this year.
Ballal co-directed No Other Land along with Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, fellow Palestinian filmmaker-activist Basel Adra, and Israeli cinematographer, editor and director Rachel Szor.
Ballal’s co-director Yuval Abraham on Monday reported the attack on Ballal on X. He also shared a clip of masked men pelting stones on a car.
Over the years, Ballal has worked as a farmer, photographer, activist and researcher. As a human rights activist, Ballal participated in the Humans of Masafer Yatta project, which sheds light on the plight of Palestinians in the West Bank region. Masafer Yatta is a collection of 19 Palestinian hamlets.
Ballal also volunteers as a field researcher for human rights organisations, including the Jerusalem-based NGO B’Tselem, to document the abuse of human rights by Israeli settlers in the West Bank.
No Other Land, which marks Ballal’s first directorial venture, follows the story of a character played by Basel Adra, a young Palestinian activist, who has been resisting the displacement of his community by Israel's military forces in Masafer Yatta. He records the gradual destruction of his homeland, where Israeli soldiers tore down homes and evicted inhabitants. During his journey, he befriends Yuval, a Jewish Israeli journalist, who helps him.
The documentary, which was shot between 2019 and 2023, had its world premiere at 2023 Berlinale, where it won the Audience Award and Berlinale Documentary Award. Following its premiere at Berlinale in 2023, No Other Land has won awards at 68 film festivals, including the BAFTA Award, European Film Award, IDA Awards and Gotham Independent Film Awards.
Despite emerging as a critically-acclaimed documentary, No Other Land had to be self-distributed since the makers could not distribute it through conventional channels in the US.
“I believe it's clear that it's for political reasons. I hope that it will change...There are still conversations happening and we are still holding onto this hope that a big distributor will have the minimal amount of courage to take on [the] film,” Abraham said to Deadline back in February about the lack of formal distribution of the documentary.
At this year’s Academy Awards, No Other Land competed for the Best Documentary (feature) award against Porcelain War, Black Box Diaries, Sugarcane and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat.
Following the news of the attack on Ballal, another co-director of No Other Land, Basel Adra, told AP that he thinks the incident might be some form of “revenge” for creating the documentary.
“We came back from the Oscars and every day since there was an attack on us,” Adra, who was also reportedly attacked by masked Israeli settlers in February, said in a statement. “This might be their revenge on us for making the movie. It feels like a punishment.”
Ballal is injured and is currently being held at a police station in an Israeli settlement, as shared by Abraham on X. “They did not let his lawyer speak to him yet so we don’t know more,” he wrote.
