Gaza war grief features in ‘devastating’ new film at Venice

Valletta cinephiles woke this week to news that the world’s oldest film festival, Venice, had just premiered a work that hits closer to home than any Mediterranean war drama in recent memory. “No Other Land”, an unprecedented co-production by Palestinian and Israeli filmmakers, opened the Orizzonti Extra sidebar to a ten-minute standing ovation—then left Maltese viewers streaming out of the Fort St Elmo open-air simulcast in tears. Shot in the West Bank’s Masafer Yatta and edited during the current Gaza bombardment, the documentary captures the slow erasure of a community whose stone-and-tarp homes look uncannily like the hillside goat-huts still dotting Gozo. For Maltese audiences, the parallel is more than visual; it is visceral.

Malta’s own history of siege and displacement—1565, 1940-42, and the 1970s exodus from Egypt—has forged a national reflex of empathy with any people trapped between sea and soldier. “When the first bulldozer appears on screen, half the crowd gasped,” recounted Emma Briffa, programme director of the Valletta Film Festival, which co-hosted the Venice satellite screening. “You could hear someone behind me whisper ‘Kemm hu qalbna miksura’—how our hearts break.” The film follows activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham as they document every demolition order, every dawn raid, every funeral of a child killed by shrapnel. One sequence shows Adra’s family huddled in what remains of their living room while Israeli jets roar overhead, the same F-16s that Maltese air-traffic controllers have tracked crossing our FIR on training hops from Sicily. The immediacy is chilling.

Local impact was immediate. Within two hours of the closing credits, the Malta Palestine Solidarity Network had launched a crowdfunding page for emergency medical supplies to Gaza, raising €11,000 by midnight—enough to charter a cargo flight via Cairo before the Rafah crossing closed again. Meanwhile, the University of Malta’s Department of Geography announced a last-minute seminar titled “Space, Erasure and Memory: Lessons from Masafer Yatta”, open to the public. Dr Maria Vella, who teaches post-colonial urbanism, told Hot Malta that the film “forces us to confront our own complicity in fortress Europe”. She pointed to the EU-funded razor-wire fence at Ħal Far and the recent pushback of 400 asylum seekers as evidence that Malta’s borders are “less an island periphery than a frontier of the same architecture of control”.

Culturally, the screening has reopened a wound that never quite healed. During the 2018 Mediterranean Film Festival, Maltese director Alex Camilleri’s “Luzzu” premiered alongside “Capernaum” by Lebanon’s Nadine Labaki, sparking debate about whether Malta’s cinematic gaze should look outward or inward. “No Other Land” collapses that binary. Its soundtrack layers the call to prayer from Hebron with archival audio of Maltese fishermen singing the Hymn to St Paul, a sonic bridge that left even secular viewers shaken. “I kept thinking of my nanna’s stories about 1942 convoys,” said 24-year-old sound designer Karl Micallef. “She told me how the sirens sounded just like that, a high-pitched wail you feel in your teeth.”

The film’s Venice triumph also shines an awkward spotlight on Malta’s own film industry, which has courted Israeli productions while simultaneously marketing itself as a “neutral Mediterranean hub”. Tourism Minister Clayton Bartolo was in Venice to promote the new Malta Film Rebate, yet found himself fielding questions about whether incentives might be extended to Palestinian filmmakers. “We are open to all stories,” he told reporters, a line that rang hollow to activists who remember 2021’s abrupt cancellation of a Ramallah shoot for “The Translator” after alleged visa refusals. The Malta Film Commission has since issued a statement promising “due diligence on human rights compliance”, though insiders say no formal policy exists.

Back in Valletta, the open-air screen is being dismantled, but the conversation is only beginning. A spontaneous vigil on Tuesday night saw 300 people light candles outside Parliament, reciting the Maltese version of the Mourner’s Kaddish. Among them was 17-year-old Dunstan Pace, who wore his Scout scarf in Palestinian colours. “We study neutrality in school,” he said, voice cracking, “but how neutral can you be when children are buried under rubble?” His question lingered in the humid night air, echoing the film’s closing line: “The land remembers, even when the maps forget.” For Malta, an island whose very limestone is a palimpsest of conquest and survival, that memory is now another layer in the rock.