No Other Land

No Other Land was a quieter kind of angry than I was expecting, but I think that approach is the kind of thing that could well change a person's mind on the whole ordeal if they were to seek this out. I guess with documentaries on subjects like this, getting someone who already feels a certain way to watch this when they might want to otherwise resist an alternate point of view is the difficult part, but there's still a lot of madness in the world, and the approaches that have been taken to sway people haven't really been working.

So it's not that No Other Land reinvents the documentary genre as a whole, but I think it has a distinctive way of presenting its central thesis. It's not peaceful, but there is a quietness to it that will likely lead some people to reflect on what they might've thought about before. Again, if they were to watch No Other Land in the first place. That's a whole other obstacle. But the approach here is more than sound and it's quietly powerful, and I'd hope that's an ultimately effective way to do it.

This did have some slower moments as far as the editing goes, but there were other sequences that had fantastic editing, and there's some striking imagery in here, too. I don't think it's a perfect documentary but it is an important one ("important" is a word I'm sure every review of this has used, oh well). Watch it regardless of how you feel about the conflict in question and I think it will help, so long as you go in open-minded. It's not necessarily subtle (and it shouldn't be), but it isn't aggressive, and if it does change minds - which I hope it can - I think that might be the reason why.