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The Oscars are far from a consensus, but few films head into Sunday’s awards with as much critical acclaim as No Other Land, a documentary chronicling the destruction of the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta by the Israeli military, which seeks to expel families from their land to make way for a military training base. The film, made by an Israeli-Palestinian collective, garnered numerous festival accolades, several independent awards and nearly every American critics association’s “best of” title. But the vast majority of Americans cannot view it.
For months, even after No Other Land secured an Oscar nomination, no major US distributor bought the project, stranding the film in a strange limbo – high visibility, at least in the film world, but almost no access to audiences. At a time when studios and streamers are typically boasting their Oscar bona fides, no company has been willing to touch it. “We were told that people were afraid” of distributing a film critical of the Israeli government during the war with Gaza, said Yuval Abraham, the film’s co-director, even though No Other Land filmed in the West Bank and wrapped before the attacks of 7 October 2023. (For transparency, Abraham has previously written for the Guardian.) “Some of them said: ‘If we take this film, we will have to balance it with another film.’”
Across months of meetings, a certain tacit risk aversion held over a film that critically examines Israel’s occupation of the West Bank. “In the states, it appears that this is perceived as controversial or risky for certain bigger distributors,” said Abraham, who is Israeli. So the film-makers took matters into their own hands and hired a booker to self-release into arthouse theaters. It first sold out New York’s Film Forum in late January and, in the subsequent month, expanded to several cities to the tune of $420,000 – making it the highest-grossing Oscar-nominated documentary of the year.
It’s an encouraging success for a creative team still seeking wide release, as well as a bleak comment on the state of a documentary market that has seen buyer interest and dollars shrink, particularly for politically sensitive or social impact films. No Other Land’s journey mirrors that of another critically acclaimed and politically fraught title last year, Union, which won the grand jury prize out of Sundance in 2024 and made the Oscar shortlist but also struggled to sell. The film, which documented the landmark efforts to form the first-ever Amazon Labor Union at the Staten Island warehouse in 2021-22, hit a wall of distributor wariness.
No one said “Amazon” but its power was clear – potential buyers saying: “I love this film, but my boss would never go for it or my company would never get behind it,” said Union’s co-producer Samantha Curley. One major streamer told the team that it wasn’t “interested in films that have a social issue or are overtly political” and was “pretty much avoiding those with just some exception”, said co-director Stephen Maing. “It’s a troubling indicator if you think about it.”
Documentary has never been an easy business, especially for ethically challenging films, but it is a particularly weird and challenging time right now, on the back side of the streaming boom and under a new administration openly hostile to liberal or progressive material, amenable to corporate favors and working to flex its propaganda through means such as the National Endowment for the Arts. “It feels different than it did 10 years ago,” said Kim Snyder, a documentarian whose most recent film The Librarians, on the rise of book bans in the US, premiered at Sundance. “We are certainly experiencing a chilling effect. As soon as these issues are being perceived or framed as anything with an R and a D, there’s a timidity by distributors – as in ‘we don’t want to go there.’”
The Librarians will be released through PBS’s Independent Lens. But other titles out of Sundance, which is usually very strong for documentaries – of the five Oscar nominees this year, only No Other Land premiered elsewhere – are still seeking distribution out of an unusually slow festival. There were no documentary deals announced during the festival, which just last year saw the celebrity film Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story sell to Warner Bros Discovery and the celebrity buddy movie Will & Harper go to Netflix for eight figures each.
Heightened Scrutiny, a film on the wave of anti-trans legislation sweeping the US before Donald Trump’s election last year, is one of several politically charged films that premiered to strong reviews and is still seeking a buyer. “That’s disappointing but not surprising,” said producer Amy Scholder. “We see major corporations bowing down to the current administration’s rollback of equity and inclusion all around. So it’s not surprising that we’re seeing media companies also seeming to shy away from politically progressive topics right now.”
The political context is also exacerbated by the market reality of a major contraction following an unprecedented boom. Traditionally, documentary film was by and large a small and hardscrabble business, marketing films on word of mouth and audience outreach. With a few exceptions, such as Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, documentaries were generally the purview of arthouse theaters and public television, and never for much money. As recently as 2017, Netflix raised eyebrows when it paid $5m for Icarus, a documentary on the Russian Olympic doping scandal, out of Sundance. (For comparison, a few weeks after Sundance, Netflix bought The Perfect Neighbor, Geeta Gandbhir’s film on Florida’s “stand your ground” laws told through police body-cam footage, for about $5m in one of the few festival deals. The highest-grossing theatrically released documentary of 2024 was Am I Racist?, a satirical film released by the far-right outlet the Daily Wire in which pundit Matt Walsh lampooned diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives; it made $12m in theaters.)
That all changed with the advent of streaming, as Netflix and other companies found documentaries to be a relatively low-cost way to burnish reputations and capture viewer interest; Netflix won its first three Oscars for documentaries, including for Icarus. Between 2018 and 2021, demand for documentaries on streaming services doubled – and so did the cash, with deals upwards of $10m, $15m, even a reported $25m for a docuseries on Rihanna that has yet to materialize.
“It’s undeniably true that more people watch documentaries now than they’ve ever watched in the history of the art form,” said Amit Dey, a documentary producer who has worked on such titles as The Contestant and As We Speak. But the gold rush – and the subsequent viewer metrics, tightly managed and monitored by streaming companies – altered the type of documentaries that were made. Streaming companies wanted eyeballs, and they knew what grabbed attention – celebrities, true crime, cliffhangers. There was interest in projects outside that trifecta – Netflix bought Feder’s previous film Disclosure, on the history of trans representation, out of Sundance in 2020 – but the bulk of the business was more commercial than truth-seeking. As the golden age of the streaming wars faded and companies tightened their belts, smaller films requiring a heftier lift in promotion and outreach got the pass. “Netflix and Amazon, they don’t want a film that caters to 5 million viewers. They want a film that caters to 50 million viewers,” said Dey. “To do something that requires a lot of word of mouth and time for set-up, it’s just not how those places tend to work.”
Issues of perceived audience, at least from a corporate perspective, dogged Union as well. “Some places may still want the next Tiger King and others may want easier political fare,” said Maing. Union, a cinema vérité film that focuses on the unglamorous work of collective organizing, “doesn’t necessarily fit into the narrower conception of vérité documentary that distributors have resorted to looking for”.
The boom, the slump, the current political landscape – all of it makes it very difficult to get certain documentaries out to audiences, let alone recoup costs or even make money. But the biggest hurdle, according to several people inside the industry, is the current distribution model of predominant streaming platforms. Netflix, Apple, Amazon – “every major buyer who created the bum rush for documentaries is a tech company,” said Dey. “And all those tech companies want to cozy up to the administration because they run tech businesses that make way more money on other things than on media. They’re just not going to take the risk on challenging subject matter.”
Self-distribution and independent releases have emerged as an alternative. The new platform Jolt took on The Bibi Files, a documentary including leaked footage of interrogations in the corruption trial of the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, after major outlets balked. “A lot of the major outlets just were nervous,” Gibney told the Hollywood Reporter. “The environment’s different than it has been in the past so we wanted to go with a new mechanism that I think is a way of getting to audiences in a very innovative way, because the algorithms they employ are designed to try and find viewers and not to change the content.”
Union, meanwhile, contracted the impact production company Red Owl Partners, who helped organize 250 partners to co-host and market screenings in 25 cities last year; with their one-off eventized screenings, it was the highest-grossing film of that night in those markets. The liberal influencer Hasan Piker livestreamed the film on his Twitch channel with 25,000 people watching. And there was an initial streaming release on the platform Gathr from Black Friday to Giving Tuesday, a window when Amazon typically experiences a spike in sales. “Film-makers and studios and streamers could not be more diametrically misaligned in what the goal is,” said Maing. But “we can make a convincing argument through hybrid and self-distribution that if one thing they care about is numbers and populist appeal, films of a political nature like this can actually perform well.”
For No Other Land, the self-distribution path has been fruitful, if still disappointing. “I’m not minimizing the theatrical … but there is a difference between making an active choice to go to an arthouse cinema over the film just being accessible on a platform, which you know tens of millions of people in the US have access to,” said Abraham. “The Oscar, for us, is not important because of the award, it’s because of its ability to raise the film’s profile, to raise Masafer Yatta’s profile as a community, which is being erased. And I hope that will help with distribution as well.”
