Yahoo Lifestyle ‘No Other Land,’ Set In Occupied West Bank, Earns Oscar Documentary Feature Nomination; International Stories Dominate Category
UPDATED with reaction from Sugarcane directors Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie. No Other Land, the documentary that condemns Israeli rule over the occupied West Bank, earned an Academy Award nomination this morning, cementing its frontrunner status.
The feature directed by a collective of four Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers has scooped up most of the pre-Oscar awards, including top prize at the Cinema Eye Honors, Best Documentary and Best Director at the IDA Awards, Best European Documentary at the European Film Awards, and the best documentary award at the Berlin Film Festival, where No Other Land premiered last February.
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The film offers a ground level view of life for Palestinians in the rural area of Masafer Yatta, where West Bank villagers live under constant threat of expulsion from their homes by Israel Defense Forces who claim their land for a military training zone. The nomination comes just days after a ceasefire took hold in occupied Gaza, about 60 miles to the west.
All of this year’s documentary feature nominees tell international stories: Black Box Diaries, set in Japan; Porcelain War, about the brutal war in Ukraine; Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, a film exploring the fate of Congo’s first democratically elected leader, and Sugarcane, about systematic abuse at an Indian Residential School in British Columbia. Only one of the nominated filmmakers is American — Brendan Bellomo, who directed Porcelain War with Ukrainian artist and soldier Slava Leontyev. Last year, not a single American filmmaker was recognized in the feature documentary category.
Shiori Itō becomes the first Japanese director nominated in the doc feature category, for Black Box Diaries, a film in which she investigates her own sexual assault by a prominent Japanese television journalist. The film’s editor, Ema Ryan Yamazaki, earned an Oscar nomination today for her short documentary Instruments of a Beating Heart. Eric Nyari earned two Oscar nominations this morning — one for producing Black Box Diaries, and for producing Instruments of a Beating Heart (he is married to Yamazaki).
Black Box Diaries hails from MTV Documentary Films, which has also earned recognition this morning for its short documentary I Am Ready, Warden, directed by Smriti Mundhra. The MTV nonfiction division has earned seven Oscar nominations in five years of existence — its first coming for the 2019 short documentary St. Louis Superman, directed by Mundhra and Sami Khan.
No Other Land is the only documentary feature nominee lacking U.S. distribution (although it is getting a very limited release beginning February 7 via Michael Tuckman Media, facilitated by Cinetic Media). Porcelain War is distributed by Picturehouse; Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat comes from Kino Lorber, and Sugarcane is distributed by National Geographic Documentary Films.
All of the directors recognized in the feature documentary category are first-time nominees, including Itō; Johan Grimonprez for Soundtrack; No Other Land’s quartet of Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Rachel Szor, and Hamdan Ballal; Bellomo and Leontyev for Porcelain War, and the Canadian duo of Julian Brave NoiseCat and Emily Kassie for Sugarcane.
NoiseCat becomes the first Indigenous director from North America to earn an Oscar nomination. He appears on camera in Sugarcane, as does his father, Ed Archie NoiseCat, as both men cope with the legacy of abuse committed at the St. Joseph’s Mission Residential School, near the Williams Lake First Nation community of T’exelc — commonly known as “Sugar Cane.” Julian’s grandmother attended the school as a girl and gave birth to her son there; Ed Archie was miraculously saved from incineration by a groundskeeper who heard his cries. Other children born to Indigenous girls there did not escape that fate.
“I’m just so grateful to the doc branch of the Academy for recognizing the film and the importance of this story,” NoiseCat told Deadline this morning, “and to get to call [film participants] Willie [Chief Willie Sellars] and Charlene [Belleau], and especially my dad this morning and to participants in our film and to just hear what it means to all of them was just so special that their story’s going to be seen in this way.”
“I’m overjoyed. It feels totally surreal,” Kassie said of the nomination. “I also felt Rick [Gilbert, former Chief, Williams Lake First Nation], one of our participants who passed away before the film was finished, I could just feel him today and imagine how proud he would be that his legacy will be continued and celebrated and his bravery and courage celebrated at the highest level.”
NatGeo continues its impressive Oscar streak with Sugarcane. The division of The Walt Disney Company has scored nominations for Best Documentary Feature in recent years for Bobi Wine: The People’s President, Fire of Love, The Cave, winning in 2018 for Free Solo.
Sugarcane, NatGeo’s latest nominee, examines the horrific legacy of Indian Residential Schools that operated in Canada and the U.S. for over a century, with a willful mission of depriving Indigenous children of their language and culture. President Biden, before leaving office, formally apologized for the U.S. government’s role in supporting the boarding school system. By the Biden administration’s count, almost a thousand children were killed or disappeared while attending those schools, although other sources put those numbers higher.
Also notable among the nominations this morning: four of the five feature docs premiered at the Sundance Film Festival last year. Only No Other Land premiered elsewhere (at the Berlinale). Porcelain War won the Grand Jury Prize for U.S. Documentary at Sundance last year, while Sugarcane took directing honors in that Sundance category. Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat won a Special Jury Prize for Cinematic Innovation at the 2024 festival.
In the Best Documentary Short category, the nominees are Death by Numbers; I Am Ready, Warden; Incident; Instruments of a Beating Heart, and The Only Girl in the Orchestra. The latter film, directed by Molly O’Brien, is streaming on Netflix. The streamer had three films in contention for Best Documentary Feature — Daughters, The Remarkable Life of Ibelin, and Will & Harper, but none of those titles secured nominations.
These are the nominees in the Documentary Feature and Documentary Short categories:
Best Documentary feature:
BLACK BOX DIARIES
Shiori Ito, Eric Nyari and Hanna Aqvilin
NO OTHER LAND
Basel Adra, Rachel Szor, Hamdan Ballal and Yuval Abraham
PORCELAIN WAR
Brendan Bellomo, Slava Leontyev, Aniela Sidorska and Paula DuPre’ Pesmen
SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ETAT
Johan Grimonprez, Daan Milius and Rémi Grellety
SUGARCANE
Nominees to be determined
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT:
DEATH BY NUMBERS
Kim A. Snyder and Janique L. Robillard
I AM READY, WARDEN
Smriti Mundhra and Maya Gnyp
INCIDENT
Bill Morrison and Jamie Kalven
INSTRUMENTS OF A BEATING HEART
Ema Ryan Yamazaki and Eric Nyari
THE ONLY GIRL IN THE ORCHESTRA
Molly O’Brien and Lisa Remington
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