How Boston-area cinemas snagged ‘No Other Land’

If you don’t want to see it, don’t come.

That’s Katherine Tallman’s philosophy about “No Other Land,” the divisive, Oscar-winning documentary showing at Brookline’s Coolidge Corner Theatre, where she is executive director and CEO.

“We didn’t go out and look for this film because it was controversial,” Tallman said. “It’s a good film. It aligns with our mission. It’s something we would do. So we showed it.” The opening-night screening — in the Coolidge’s largest, 440-seat cinema — sold out.

“No Other Land” pulled off the unusual feat of winning the Oscar for best documentary this month despite having no U.S. distributor. The independent film, about Israel’s destruction of villages in the West Bank, was directed by a team of Palestinians and Israelis and has been met with controversy. No major U.S. distributor would touch it, presumably because of its criticism of Israel.

As a result, the film has shown in few theaters around the United States. So it is perhaps a surprise that it is now playing at two Boston-area cinemas: Coolidge Corner Theatre and West Newton Cinema. It also screened at the Regent Theatre in Arlington in October.

To make “No Other Land,” a collective of four directors — Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, who are Palestinian, and Yuval Abraham, and Rachel Szor, who are Israeli — captured nearly 2,000 hours of footage from 2019 to October 2023. The film bears witness to the Israeli military’s destruction of Adra’s homeland, Masafer Yatta, a collection of hamlets in the south of the Israeli-occupied West Bank, by claiming the land as military training grounds.

Abraham said in January that distributors’ reluctance to take on the film was “something that’s completely political.”

“We’re obviously talking about the Israeli military occupation of the West Bank, and it’s very ugly,” Abraham told Variety. “The conversation in the United States appears to be far less nuanced — there is much less space for this kind of criticism, even when it comes in the form of a film.”

Small independent theaters, like the Coolidge Corner Theatre and West Newton Cinema, stepped up to screen the film.

Tallman said the film has had great audience reception so far, and that the theater will keep showing it as long as people want to see it — or until they have to make room for new films. She said she received one “really unpleasant” email from a patron who questioned why the Coolidge would screen the film, declaring they would never come again.

Connie White, the theater’s longtime booker and the former owner of the Brattle Theatre in Cambridge, is also the programming director for the Middleburg Film Festival in Virginia. White saw an advance screening of the “No Other Land,” which she featured in the October festival, and knew the Coolidge Corner Theatre would be interested.

“No Other Land” premiered at the West Newton Cinema last Friday and was the second-best performer over the weekend, behind Sean Baker’s Oscar-sweeping “Anora.” Elizabeth Heilig, president of the West Newton Cinema Foundation, said theater staff have been thanked on the way out by patrons for showing the film. Some said the film was difficult to watch but important for people to see.

“We’re very happy to be showing the film,” Heilig said. “There’s certainly a great diversity of opinions about the Israel-Gaza conflict, and that diversity exists in Newton and in the Greater Boston community, for sure. We want to provide people who want to see the film an opportunity to see it, and we want people to be able to make up their own minds about it.”

West Newton will screen the film until at least next week.

Kim Kronenberg and Allen Taylor of Brookline are co-directors of the nonprofit Science Training Encouraging Peace, which pairs health and computer science graduates — one from either Gaza or West Bank, and one from Israel — to partner in research. They saw “No Other Land” at the Coolidge, and Kronenberg said it was a disturbing film but one that should be seen.

“Especially this moment in time where America is encouraging or endorsing the most right-wing elements in Israel to do whatever they want in the West Bank, I think it’s a cautionary tale in that it allows people to see what really happens when you take other people’s land and how well received you are or you aren’t,” Taylor said. “The film forces you to think about, what’s the problem there? Why is there constant conflict?”

“No Other Land” had its world premiere at the 2024 Berlinale, or Berlin International Film Festival, and won the Berlinale Documentary Award as well as the Panorama Audience Award. The film found distribution in 24 countries outside the U.S., including France and Britain.

To reach U.S. screens, the ‘No Other Land’ team worked with Cinetic Media, a film financing and distribution company, alongside independent distributor Michael Tuckman, who books individual theaters and has worked with the Coolidge for years. White booked the film through Tuckman.

So far, “No Other Land” is the Coolidge Corner Theatre’s seventh highest grossing film of 2025, a fiscal year that began November 1, 2024. The two leaders are “The Brutalist” and “Nosferatu.”

“We’ve grossed like over $200,000 on ‘The Brutalist’ and ‘Nosferatu’, and we’ve grossed close to $50,000 on [‘No Other Land’],” Tallman said, “but in a short period of time, and at a time, pre-Oscars, when not that many people really knew about it.”

After the film’s premiere at the Coolidge in early February, panelists hosted a discussion about it.

“And so if there was going to be any kind of, like, big showdown controversy, it would have happened there,” Tallman said, “and there wasn’t, I think, because our audiences in general are — they’re curious. They’re balanced. They know what they don’t know.”

This story is part of a partnership between WBUR and the Boston University Department of Journalism.

This story has been updated to include that "No Other Land" also screened at the Regent Theatre in Arlington in October.