Hamdan Ballal Pens Candid Op-Ed About West Bank Assault: “Our Movie Won an Oscar, But Our Lives Are No Better Than Before”
Palestinian co-director of No Other Land Hamdan Ballal has penned a candid op-ed in The New York Times detailing the extent of his West Bank assault last month: “Our movie won an Oscar, but our lives are no better than before.”
Ballal, a co-director of the Academy Award-winning documentary, as well as two other men, Khaled Mohammad Shanran and Nasser Shreteh, were attacked and arrested late March. Another co-director of the film, Israeli creative Yuval Abraham, said Ballal “had injuries to his head and stomach, bleeding” after being assaulted by a group of settlers in his home village of Susiya.
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After the Academy “refused” to publish a statement in support of Ballal after his Oscar win, according to Abraham, the organization was swift to apologize. “We abhor the suppression of free speech under any circumstances,” it later said in a statement.
Now, Ballal is talking about the experience in his own words. On what was a typical evening on Mar. 24, Ballal says he was quickly confronted by a group of men at his home and believed he and his wife would be killed that night. “It is difficult for me to write about this moment now,” Ballal wrote in the piece published Friday. “After I was beaten, I was handcuffed, blindfolded and thrown into an army jeep. For hours I lay blindfolded on the ground on what I later learned was an army base, fearing that I would be held for a long time and beaten again and again. I was released a day later.”
The filmmaker said that winning the Oscar just three weeks earlier was “one of the most incredible moments of his life”. He said: “I had a taste of power and possibility… Los Angeles and the were of an entirely different world from the one I know: I was struck by the enormous buildings, the rushing cars, the wealth all around me. And suddenly there we were, me and my three other co-directors, on one of the world’s most important stages, accepting the award.”
But even though the movie received global recognition, Ballal confesses that he feels the group had failed in their attempt to make life better for his fellow community. “My life is still at the mercy of the settlers and the occupation,” he said. “My community is still suffering from unending violence. Our movie won an Oscar, but our lives are no better than before.”
The attack on him and his community was “brutal”, Ballal continued, but occurs frequently in the region. “Just a few days later, dozens of settlers, many of them masked, attacked Jinba, a village nearby. Five people were hospitalized, and more than 20 were arrested. Later the army raided the village and ransacked homes, the mosque and the school.”
With the press attention received because of the Oscar victory, Ballal finishes the op-ed by urging the public not to “turn away” from the violence happening in Susiya and further afield. “I know that there are thousands and thousands of people who now know my name and my story, who know my community’s name and our story and who stand with us and support us. Don’t turn away now.”
The IDF had offered a different version of events surrounding the incident in its own statement released after the incident, saying the violence started after “several terrorists hurled rocks at Israeli citizens, damaging their vehicles.” Both sides began throwing rocks at one another, and as IDF and Israeli police arrived at the conflict, “several terrorists began hurling rocks at the security forces.” Both parties agreed that three Palestinians were detained.
No Other Land, capturing the budding friendship between a Palestinian activist and Israeli journalist, was directed by four filmmakers — two Israeli, two Palestinian. It took home the prize for best documentary at the 97th annual Academy Awards on March 2.
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