The mayor of Miami Beach, Florida, is threatening to shut down an arthouse theater for the grievous crime of showing 2025’s winner of the Best Documentary Oscar. The film in question is, of course, No Other Land, the critically celebrated depiction of life in the Masafer Yatta region of the West Bank, filmed by a team of Israeli and Palestinian filmmakers determined to showcase the state-imposed differences in the conditions in which two of its creators, Palestinian Basel Adra and Israeli Yuval Abraham, are forced/allowed to live their lives. As A.V. Club film editor Jacob Oller wrote in his survey of the film, No Other Land is already a damn hard movie to see in the States, despite having since won an Oscar: U.S. distributors have skittered away from picking up the film and giving it an official release, leaving it to be viewed only in small and limited runs. Now it might get a little harder, as Mayor Steven Meiner has reportedly drafted a resolution to shut down Miami Beach’s O Cinema theater in retaliation for showing the movie.
Calling the film “a false one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people that is not consistent with the values of our City and residents,” Meiner has gone on the offensive against O Cinema, which leases its theater space from the city, and which is run by a non-profit that receives grant money from local government. That includes citing Adra and Abraham’s speeches at the Oscars, writing in a letter to the theater—viewed by Deadline—that “The film director’s comments at the Oscars prove the antisemitic nature of the film using Jew-hatred propaganda and lies such as ‘ethnic cleansing.’ Unfortunately, Jews for thousands of years have heard this antisemitic rhetoric; I am just surprised that O Cinema, utilizing Miami Beach taxpayer funding, would willingly disseminate such hateful propaganda.” Meiner has put forward a draft resolution that would terminate O Cinema’s lease and delete its grant funding.
Although it initially appeared to at least consider pulling the film, O Cinema’s management ended up doubling down, scheduling more screenings, and giving a statement to the Miami Heraldthat “Our decision to screen No Other Land is not a declaration of political alignment. It is, however, a bold reaffirmation of our fundamental belief that every voice deserves to be heard, even, and perhaps especially, when it challenges us.”
Deadline, meanwhile, has also obtained a statement from the film’s co-director, Yuval Abraham, about the decision: “When the mayor uses the word antisemitism to silence Palestinians and Israelis who proudly oppose occupation and apartheid together, fighting for justice and equality, he is emptying it out of meaning. I find that to be very dangerous. Censorship is always wrong. We made this film to reach US audiences from a wide variety of political views. I believe that once you see the harsh reality of occupation in Masafer Yatta in the West Bank, it becomes impossible to justify it, and that’s why the mayor is so afraid of No Other Land. It won’t work. Banning a film only makes people more determined to see it.”
