At ‘No Other Land’ screening, Fil-Palestinian beauty queen says Gaza awareness important

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‘Palestinians are very much like Filipinos, we are very resilient,’ says TV host and beauty queen Zahra Bianca Saldua during a Philippine screening of Oscar awardee ‘No Other Land’

MANILA, Philippines – Zahra Bianca al-Jaber Saldua is glad that Palestinians have found more allies in the Philippines.

The Filipino-Palestinian TV host and beauty queen expressed her thanks during a screening of the Israeli-Palestinian documentary No Other Land at Sine Pop in Quezon City on Saturday, May 3.

The film won Best Documentary Feature during this year’s Oscars last March.

“Palestinians have finally been heard because this has been happening since 1948… it will signify already 76 years of occupation,” said Saldua, referring to the May 1948 Nakba or the forced displacement of around 700,000 Palestinians by Zionist forces to create the state of Israel. 

What followed is a struggle for land between Palestinians and Israelis that has spanned decades. [READ: EXPLAINER: Israel-Palestinian dispute hinges on statehood, land, Jerusalem, refugees] 

No Other Land follows Palestinian activist Basel Adra and Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who recorded the Israeli army’s forced displacement of Adra’s community in Masafer Yatta, West Bank.

“One of the things that you can notice in the documentary is they go to sleep and they do it all over again. They don’t know what kind of struggle, but they know that it is going to be a struggle,” Saldua said, who attended the screening on behalf of the Palestinian Embassy. 

“Palestinians are very much like Filipinos, we are very resilient. It’s very hard to cry about things like this — which is why I don’t want to — but it’s always laughter that we’re looking for. You’ll see that they always celebrate the small wins,” she added.

Saldua was born to a Palestinian mother and a Filipino father, and has relatives currently in Tulkarem in the West Bank. Her brother, she added, was in Palestine three months before the October 7, 2023 attacks that has since led to the deaths of more than 41,000.

She called the reception of No Other Land “a huge step,” and stressed the importance of releasing documentaries like the film in raising awareness about the situation in Gaza and the West Bank.

“Now we have more allies in this country than ever before, and I hope that more Filipinos will see stories like this documentary,” she said.

Co-director Hamdan Ballal in March 2025 was attacked by Israeli settlers in the West Bank, and detained by Israeli soldiers before eventually being released. Ballal wrote in a New York Times opinion piece on April 25: “in an instant, it was as if the Oscars had never happened, as if the award didn’t mean anything.”

First of many

Filmmaker Monster Jimenez of the Filipino Documentary Society (FilDocs), the group that organized the screening, said they were “super surprised” by the event’s reception.

“We set it up here (Sine Pop), where there are only, what, 50 people who can watch. And then, in an hour [after announcing the screening], we reached more than 100 registrations. So that’s why there’s a second screening,” Jimenez shared in a mix of English and Filipino.

No Other Land is the first of documentaries that FilDocs aims to show to Filipinos every quarter, in a project called Basta Dokyu.

The project is a followup to the 2020 Daang Dokyu festival, which screened 45 documentary films in celebration of 100 years of Philippine cinema. Daang Dokyu now houses an online database of Filipino documentaries.

FilDocs is looking to bring to the Philippines two more films that were nominated for Best Documentary along with No Other Land: Porcelain War, which follows Ukrainian artists amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; and Soundtrack to a Coup d’Etat, chronicling the moment when two musicians crashed the United Nations Security Council during the Cold War.

“But we’re also not just looking at Oscars. We’re also looking at other festivals to see who else we can partner with,” Jimenez added.

While Basta Dokyu is showing documentaries to Filipinos for free, FilDocs is also accepting donations from viewers to keep the project going. – Rappler.com