Florida mayor wants to evict cinema for showing ‘No Other Land’

The mayor of Miami Beach wants to evict an independent cinema house from city-owned property for playing “No Other Land” about Palestinian displacement, which recently won the Oscar for best documentary feature.

The joint Palestinian-Israeli film focuses on the continuous destruction of a Palestinian community in Masafer Yatta in the occupied West Bank.

The move by the Florida mayor to withdraw the film comes as civil rights advocates across the US are urging for widespread distribution of the film.

Following the film’s Oscar win, the Council on American-Islamic Relations called for increased accessibility of “No Other Land” for moviegoers.

“Any other documentary this highly acclaimed would have been picked up by a major film company long ago. In the wake of No Other Land’s Oscar win, the unprecedented censorship of this film must end,” CAIR’s national communications director Ibrahim Hooper said in a public statement.

“We call on US film companies and streaming services to pursue this Oscar-winning documentary and quickly make it available to the American public. Palestinian stories have been ignored amid the far-right Israeli government‘s campaign of ethnic cleansing carried out with American taxpayer dollars. The American people deserve the right to see this film,” he said.

“No Other Land” has won dozens of international awards and has been lauded by critics for humanising Palestinians. It has also seen backlash by some Israelis as well as Palestinian BDS (boycott) advocates over concerns of normalisation.

Over the past several years, Israeli violence against Palestinians in the occupied West Bank, where the film takes place, has increased sharply.

The Miami Beach mayor, Steven Meiner, however, has characterised the film as “one-sided propaganda”, “an attack on Jewish people”, “normalising hate”, and “disseminating antisemitism”.

In a newsletter to his constituents, he gave his own scathing review of the film. Claiming that he had watched it, he wrote that the film “can best be described as a false one-sided propaganda attack on the Jewish people that is not consistent with the values of our City and residents.”

“I am a staunch believer in free speech. But normalising hate and then disseminating antisemitism in a facility owned by the taxpayers of Miami Beach… is unjust to the values of our city and residents and should not be tolerated,” Meiner added. 

He has said that he wants to withhold grants to O Cinema. City commissioners will vote on Meiner’s motion next week. The grant funds that would be withheld amount to around $40,000, according to reports.

Yuval Abraham, an Israeli journalist and one of the documentary’s four directors, responded to the threat via X, writing, “When this mayor uses the word antisemitism to silence us, Palestinians and Israelis who proudly oppose occupation and apartheid together, fighting for justice and equality for all, he is dangerously emptying it out of meaning. Once you witness Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Masafer Yatta it becomes impossible to justify it, and that’s why the mayor is so afraid of our film. It won’t work. Banning a film only makes people more determined to see it.”