No Other Land will be available to stream on U.S. platforms October 20, with no help from major distributors. The Academy Award-winning documentary on life for Palestinian families in Masafer Yatta will drop on Apple TV, Amazon, Google Play, and YouTube. The team behind the doc says they rejected a deal with Mubi to distribute after it was revealed the company had taken $100 million from Sequoia Capital, a venture-capital firm that is also a key investor in Israeli military tech. “This film shows the reality of Israeli occupation and oppression against Palestinians — but that truth apparently didn’t fit the narrative that big U.S. streamers wanted to promote,” said co-director Basel Adra in a press release. “We talked to MUBI for months, and initially thought our film had found its home, but in the end we learned that they were accepting a huge investment from Sequoia Capital.”
The No Other Land team says that by self-releasing, they can make sure proceeds from the film go to Palestinians in Masafer Yatta. “It made no sense to us that they would take our film showing Israel’s oppression of Palestinians, and then also partner with a company contributing to that oppression,” co-director Yuval Abraham said.
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This isn’t the first issue Mubi has encountered since news broke about Sequoia. Eddie Huang claimed his Mubi-distributed documentary, Vice Is Broke, was left un-promoted after he criticized the company for accepting Sequoia’s money. At the Venice Film Festival, Jim Jarmusch said he was “disappointed and quite disconcerted” by the deal. Sequoia Capital is an investor in Israeli tech start-up Kela, which is developing AI for the Israeli military. Mubi released a statement on June 14, saying in part “The beliefs of individual investors do not reflect the views of MUBI. We take the feedback from our community very seriously, and are steadfast in remaining an independent founder-led company.”
