Look, I'm just gonna say it: if you're a filmmaker and your promotional strategy involves the sentence "yes, we gave money to Hamas," you might want to workshop that. Israeli director Yuval Abraham—who co-directed "No Other Land" with Palestinian activist Basel Adra—has spent the last year collecting awards and glowing profiles for a documentary about a West Bank village being bulldozed. The film won a Berlinale prize, got an Oscar nomination, and turned Abraham into the kind of guy who gets invited to give TED-style talks about empathy.
Then Rachel Szor, the film's cinematographer, sat down for an interview and casually mentioned that the production had paid members of Hamas for access and footage. Not "allegedly." Not "reportedly." Just—yeah, we cut checks to the guys who run Gaza. The internet, as you might expect, handled this with its usual grace. Within hours, the phrase "Hamas documentary" was trending, senators were demanding answers, and every pro-Israel account on X was doing the digital equivalent of setting off fireworks in a library.
Here's the thing nobody seems willing to admit: this is how war journalism has always worked. When you want to film inside a war zone, you pay the guys with guns. It's ugly, it's morally bankrupt, and it's also the only way you get out alive. The New York Times has done it. The BBC has done it. Every major outlet that ever embedded in a conflict zone has, at some point, handed cash to someone whose hands were not clean. The difference is they don't usually announce it on a press tour while accepting a human rights award.
What makes this a genuine five-alarm dumpster fire is the timing. "No Other Land" was already controversial because it portrays the Israeli occupation critically—which, fine, that's a legitimate perspective. But the moment you admit you paid Hamas, you hand every critic a nuclear weapon. Now the entire conversation isn't about Palestinian displacement. It's about whether the filmmakers were funding terrorism. And honestly? That's a much easier story to sell to Congress.
Szor's explanation was that the payments were for "logistical support" and "security." Which is the journalistic equivalent of saying you only hired the mob for "parking." Everyone knows what it means. Nobody wants to say it out loud. And the people who do say it out loud get called antisemitic if they're on one side or genocide apologists if they're on the other.
Meanwhile, the film's defenders are insisting this changes nothing. The documentary stands on its own merits. Which is true, technically. But in the real world, nobody watches a documentary the same way once they know the production budget included a line item for "Hamas access fees." It's like finding out your favorite cooking show paid the Mafia for tomatoes. The recipe might be great. You're still thinking about the tomatoes.
The Oscars haven't pulled the nomination yet. The distributors haven't dropped it. But the discourse has already eaten itself alive, which is the only outcome anyone could have predicted. Welcome to 2025, where a documentary about a village becomes a referendum on terrorism financing, and everyone loses.
**My take:** This was always going to happen. You can't make a film inside a war zone without getting your hands dirty, and you can't admit you got your hands dirty without torching your own credibility. Abraham and Szor made a great film and a terrible PR decision. The only people who win here are the ones who never wanted the film to exist in the first place.