The Syrian Civil War has lasted for nearly a decade, the myriad conflicts of which have been fodder for numerous feature-length documentary films: For Sama, The Cave, City of Ghosts, Last Men In Aleppo. Those documentaries each focus on the various parties involved in this conflict, and their many contrasting agendas: Syrian citizens who rose up against their oppressive government led by President Bashar al-Assad; militant group the Islamic State, which flourished in the chaos and started a bloody campaign in their effort to build a conservative Islamic caliphate; the government’s allies, including international partners like Russia and Iran, unleashed devastating airstrikes, while Syrian rebel groups received backing from the likes of the United States, Britain, Israel, France, and Turkey.
More than 13 million Syrians have since become refugees, causing a massive worldwide crisis. There are so many angles from which to craft compelling portraits of the individuals fighting on the ground for their lives and their way of life, and so much to cover in terms of how the war has spilled over into the rest of the Middle East and around the world, and No Man’s Land fails to communicate even the most basic elements of any of this. A resolutely unimaginative exercise in orientalist condescension, the thoroughly flat No Man’s Land treats the civil war as a tourist destination, and most of its insights about how the conflict became a playground for the West are decidedly unintentional.
Co-created by a predominantly Israeli team, including Ron Leshem (a writer for Euphoria), Eitan Mansuri (who produced the Israeli drama When Heroes Fly), and Maria Feldman and Amit Cohen (responsible for the Israeli thriller False Flag), No Man’s Land follows a web of individuals linked together by their connections to the Syrian Civil War. Unbeknownst to them, they share certain contacts, move within the same circles, and are propelled forward by similar motivations. In 2014, French engineer Antoine (Félix Moati), convinced that he sees his missing-for-four-years sister Anna (Mélanie Thierry) in a news clip from Syria about female fighters facing the Islamic State, is desperate to track her down. While Antoine—who doesn’t speak Arabic, and doesn’t understand the intricacies of the war—leaves behind his parents and girlfriend to sneak into Syria through Turkey, three other men arrive in the country as well.
Brits Nasser (James Krishna Floyd), Iyad (Jo Ben Ayed), and Paul (Dean Ridge) are childhood best friends who are proud to join the Islamic State and eager to prove themselves; they know they’ll be labeled terrorists if they ever returned to the U.K., but have no intention of going back. (Think of a nonsatirical Four Lions.) They want to help build the organization’s robust social media presence and defend their ideals in battle, and they have no problem with killing any of the infidels who stand in the way. Opposing them on the battlefield are groups of fighters who are primarily women, whose gender and boldness equally offend the patriarchal Islamic State. The highly effective, strictly trained women are members of the Kurdish Women’s Protection Units (YPG), a militia linked with the socialist Kurdistan Workers’ Party, who desire autonomy and equal rights for the Kurdish ethnic minority. When Antoine links up with these women, he forms a tentative friendship with the French-speaking Sarya (Souheila Yacoub), who grew up in Paris before moving back to Syria as a teenager with her family after her mother’s death.
As No Man’s Land progresses, each episode incorporates various flashbacks to provide insight into how these people ended up in this place. None of these characters subvert expectations, least of all aspiring jihadis Nasser, Iyad, and Paul, who are given no reasons for their radicalization. The trio go from being cute kids arguing about haircuts to tweens referencing a local mosque and making plans to build bombs that blow up Coldplay. Paul is so close to Nasser and Iyad that he begins reading the Koran as a child (“This book is sick!” is perhaps the show’s funniest line) and eventually converts to Islam, but just being around brown people is all it takes for him to turn into a terrorist. No depth is afforded to anyone. Sarya’s sexually charged adolescence in France makes her move to the more traditional Syria after her mother’s death a struggle. Antoine is an overprotective brother who ruins Anna’s relationship with an Iranian man and is practically disgusted by her increased empathy toward participants in Iran’s Green Movement and the neighboring Arab Spring. Those scenes interrupt the show’s bleakly dusty portrayal of 2014 Syria, but none of this is enough to adequately explain what inspired these people to dive headfirst into a war zone.
Most frustratingly, the flashbacks are also symptoms of a larger narrative shortcoming: All of No Man’s Land’s characters are outsiders who project onto Syria their own ideologies or desires. The show is barely interested in the country as anything other than a place to plop its characters, and the result is that No Man’s Land has no sense of specific cultural identity. Instead, an overreliance on clichéd images and too-familiar conceits to communicate Middle Eastern strife play into viewers’ most simplistic stereotypes. Long lines of refugees trod by, clutching all their possessions; we never hear them speak. There are no helpers anywhere, although Syrian medical personnel and emergency responders have generated plenty of headlines over the years. The YPG women barely seem to communicate with each other; Eva Husson’s feature film Girls Of The Sun did a far better job showing the bonds between these women, how they protect one another, and the uniquely feminine rituals they share. No Man’s Land’s devotes so many scenes to making clear that bearded Muslim men waving guns and yelling “Allahu Akbar” are the bad guys that it has little space for anything else. That’s not meant as a defense of the Islamic State, but as an observation on the stark imbalance between how much time the show spends on documenting garish atrocities committed by them and how thoroughly it fails in providing basic information that would help the female-centered subplots click, like a brief explanation of the Kurdish struggle for independence and the role the YPG plays within it.
At least Floyd, Thierry, and Yacoub elevate their characters with the show’s strongest performances. As Nasser, Floyd finds that narrow space between dead-eyed blankness and tamped-down anger, recognizably pained even with a black scarf covering most of his face. Thierry is the center of the sixth episode, the series’ best for its acknowledgment—albeit slight—that foreign governments tamper with those of the Middle East for their own self-serving ends. And although Sarya is dreadfully underwritten, Yacoub’s performance of her both as a teen, bursting with curiosity about the YPG women welcomed into her village, and as a more cynical, hardened adult now part of the YPG herself, speaks to the soul-flattening decay of the Syrian Civil War. That ensemble can’t counteract how No Man’s Land, neither enlightening nor entertaining, can be summed up in a line of dialogue that is reflective as it is superficial: “War sucks.”
14 Comments
Oh no, the mean show wasn’t politically sensitive enough for Roxana. It’s mind blowing that anyone is stupid enough to let you review things.
Wow! It sounds like a pile of garbage. There are so many things this show could focus on – particularly around the dehumanization of refugees. ‘They have blood in their veins and they cry when in pain.’ Instead the focus (based on this article) seems to be on perpetuating Islamophobia and colouring the entire brown race with a simple minded fool’s brush. Like saying all terror incidents in the media are by Muslims, therefore they must all be terrorists. How disappointing that a more diverse cast wasn’t used to tell what are some of the most tragic stories of our lifetime. And even more disappointing to try and push political agenda onto this – this would have been a perfect show to be developed by the more liberal minded creatives in the Middle East that we all pretend to support. This is a story of their land – what is more powerful than giving them the voice and the platform to tell it. Wars destroy everything and everyone – we all lose pieces of our humanity in them.
colouring the entire brown race with a simple minded fool’s brush. I have rarely heard Syrians called a brown race. I mean Jerry Seinfeld’s grandparents are from Allepo. Muna Wassef is one of the more famous Syrian actresses, Actor Abbas al-NouryFilm Director Abdellatif AbdelhamidI mean they are Asian and often Muslim, but even in America one would be hard pressed to call Syrians a brown race.
I have never liked the rise in the use of colour to define race – it’s like we have now come full circle. I was actually referencing the comment in the article about brown people and terrorism, but I completely take your point. I have always been slightly amused by how the Middle East generally don’t want to be classed as Asian, just like many North Africans who want to be classed as Middle Eastern. Me? I’m a chameleon who has taken on the whole rainbow.
I think the problem is that America – and hence the Internet – sees the world through the lens of its overriding historical trauma: the enslavement and subsequent domination of dark-skinned Africans by light-skinned Europeans. Its language for talking about oppression, about difference, about power, is primarily racial. [outside of gender – but even there the analogies have famously been made]So when Americans realise that the world is bigger than just “WASPs vs African-Americans”, and they’re confronted by obviously non-African-American people who are ALSO victims of oppression, they wherever possible make sense of this by making those victims, as it were, honorary African-Americans. Hence the very broad concept of “brown” or “of colour”. Spanish-speaking people get discriminated against in the US? OK, then they can’t be ‘white’ anymore. They’re ‘brown’ – despite the fact that, while some Mexicans with more native american ancestry may be slightly darker in skin tone than a Norwegian, the general skin tone ‘pools’ of Spanish-speaking and non-Spanish-speaking people almost completely overlap (a lot of Argentinian-Americanss will be considerably paler-skinned than a lot of, say, Serbian-Americans). Likewise, everybody from North Africa, the Middle East or Central Asia must be ‘brown’, because they’re not ‘black’ and yet they’ve historically faced domination and discrimination. Despite the fact that there are many Syrians and Afghans who could easily pass for Germans.[I’ve even seen Americans do this to explain racism against eastern europeans in Britain. Oh, that’s because the white Anglo-Saxons are oppressing the brown eastern europeans. Well, at a great stretch you MIGHT say that, say, Romanians tend on average to be darker than Scots (though it’s a very small difference)… but it gets really silly when you try to apply that to Poles and Lithuanians!]It’s human nature, once we’ve created a framework to understand something, to want to contort that framework to understand everything else we encounter, rather than to begin from scratch. So Americans try to use ‘white vs non-white’ to explain every ethnic conflict…
Steve Jobs’s father was also from Aleppo
Gach…!Why this hackneyed TP being invoked here as a deflection?Are you a SEA member?
its propaganda
Yikes!It sounds unnecessarily harsh _prima-facie_ but then…..You recall the number of archetypical “Hollywood” tropes about everything east of Paris in the “pilot” episode in and of itself. As much as I want to watch this Is’rāelī-fronted series on continental Francophone dime, particularly ‘cus of all that much bandied-around “production-design” over attention-to-detail for authenticity of accents/dialects/tongues of various characters across regions purportedly upto the post-production stage( precisely: “localisation” aka subtitling) even — instead of the good ol’ transatlantic English-language pop-culture having non-Anglo influenced characters mostly speaking English as their primary-tongue with each other and code-switching sparsely to their purported “first language” as if the characters are themselves treating their own “native language” as an exotic “cool”. But managing to excel in just one department, assuming it can even keep-up — and being the ‘most-Hollywood of non-Hollywood, non-English language entertainment’ you must’ve come across, is hardly enough of a motivator for me.In fact, in all of that uszche PR bluster: Miraculously they let it slip that they brought in not-just one, but 2 French screenwriters to and I quote, “in particular lessen stereotypes about France and the French.” And it’s not just a “consulting producer” type role, either. In fact, there’s a creatively-bizarre title for topic-wide editorial _veto_ over the final-draft of the show’s teleplay scripts.Like, my goodness…!How woefully incompetent these whole bunch of Is’rāelī( I dunno why the article says “predominantly” instead of ‘all’, since Mr Mansouri could be a Druze) “creators” were, like no.. They were all too satisfied in imposing their own acquired-worldviews and collecting paychecks to go back home, instead of bothering a bit about getting anything beyond languages since the subject-matter as a whole doesn’t seem to concern their “State of Tel Avīv” pampered privilege, much.Ahh.. Welp!At least they reportedly filmed the exteriors of Paris over in Morocco as was the case with every single East European & West Asian locale, even.(As if that’s just somehow not yet enough, the interiors of Paris & possibly İstanbul are filmed in Belgium, consisting the clear-minority of overall production-schedule.)This looked like just-another Hollywood propaganda bleeding their hearts for the alleged predicament of Is’rāel Armed Forces.
In fairness..Expecting that any refreshingly-ingenious result could borne out of any undertaking by any high-budget/mainstream project out of ‘Euro Christian’-descended( “sEcULaR”) NATO country, is: Just-another, just-another folly.. And also ambitiously titled as “Fertile Crescent” but to pander to my own _personal mantra,_ mayhaps enough of humility to eventually settle on a far more generic English-language title.After all.. What more could be expected from this Is’rāelī-fronted series on continental Francophone dime, particularly with all of that much bandied-around “production-design” over attention-to-detail for authenticity of accents/dialects/tongues of various characters across regions purportedly upto the post-production stage( precisely: “localisation” aka subtitling) even — instead of the good ol’ transatlantic English-language pop-culture having non-Anglo influenced characters mostly speaking English as their primary-tongue with each other and code-switching sparsely to their purported “first language” as if the characters are themselves treating their own “native language” as an exotic “cool”. But managing to excel in just one department, assuming it can even keep-up — and being the ‘most-Hollywood of non-Hollywood, non-English language entertainment’ you must’ve come across, is hardly enough of a motivator for me. You recall the number of archetypical “Hollywood” tropes about everywhere east of Paris in the “pilot” episode in and of itself.In fact, in all of that uszche PR bluster: Miraculously they let it slip that they brought in not-just one, but 2 French screenwriters to and I quote, “in particular lessen stereotypes about France and the French.” And it’s not just a ‘consulting producer’ type role, either. In fact, there’s a creatively-bizarre title for topic-wide editorial _veto_ over the final-draft of the show’s teleplay scripts.Like, my goodness…!How woefully-incompetent these whole bunch of Is’rāelī( I dunno why the article says “predominantly” instead of ‘all’, since Mr Mansouri could be a Druze) “creators” were, like no.. They were all too satisfied in imposing their own acquired-worldviews and collecting paychecks to go back home, instead of bothering a bit about getting anything beyond languages right, since the subject-matter as a whole doesn’t seem to concern their “State of Tel Avīv” pampered privilege, much.Ahh.. Welp!At least they reportedly filmed the exteriors of Paris over in Morocco as was the case with every single East European & West Asian locale, even.(As if that’s just somehow not yet enough, the interiors of Paris & possibly İstanbul are filmed in Belgium, consisting the clear-minority of overall production-schedule.)This looked like just-another Hollywood propaganda bleeding their hearts for the perennial “predicament” of Is’rāel Armed Forces.(Something which is an indisputable speciality of every single Is’rāelī showrunner whose “thriller” show goes viral, just like all other popular countries’ creatives but without that glowing nucl.. err.. red ‘special status( read baggage)’ of Is’rāel.)⏎Or if you still wanna go back to the bliss of all-too-comforting ignorance: A good ol’ “interview”-style PR fluff for this miniseries in that Saūdī regime’s part-owned showbiz-news behemoth aka the most-powerful rival of this site’s network, PMC® in its legacy zine Variety® was — riddled with ‘innocent’ typos in most-awkward of places as if it was actually copyedited by a European who’s still in the beginning stages of learning some variant of International English, just as we’re supposed to believe from that interview and mayhaps, these writers’ past _CV_ that: They just made innocent gaffes in weaving a work they had no mood for authentically executing[ together].
“All of No Man’s Land’s characters are outsiders who project onto Syria their own ideologies or desires.”
So basically it’s a propaganda film like many Israeli shows such as Fauda and the blatantly titled Mossad 101.
In fairness: What’s even tangentially connected to Is’rāel in the almost-entirety of pop-culture across ‘Euro Christian’-descended( “sEcULaR”) societies, isn’t?Nevermind the US.From the overrated NETFLIX® with its Originals, to obviously the conspicuously far too reticent in otherwise “Privacy First℠” branding mascot in Apple® when it came to the cyberweapon Pegasus®, in its TV+ “Originals”. What’s left?Needless to “split hairs” like I have ceased taking the likes of talk-show hosts with as much sincerity as I did, and that too: Long enough before learning that fortunately/prophetically, the mascot of “Team Coco” never-ever warmed upto me for I to become his regular-viewer. From whitewashing Is’rāel’s illegal annexation of Golan Heights in his “Conan Without Borders®” Special in a hackneyed way of what-should-be-now-known-as ‘FOX® Weather grappling with climate emergency’, to arguably of lesser intensity but given the priorities of _Americana_ in this topic-area sense decades.. To criminally gloss over it and move on.. Even when he purportedly hitched a ride with the First Lady of 43rd Lady for his “Mission Conan℠” Special, alongwith his ostensibly entire-crew as well as performing guests of music and standup. Nary an exploration of the host-country under whose territory they were producing this Pentagon-approved Special save for obligatorily mentioning the nearest metropolis, the country’s capital which is metonymic for the base HQs’ jurisdiction simply ‘cus of the country as a whole being classified as a “city State”, leading to the urban-legend of the country more than half of Is’rāel’s internationally-recognised territories being known only by its capital jurisdiction.(*Trivia:* As a voracious researcher, I’ve had to just watch that missed, 10-minutes long “BTS” video of that Special just for the sake of fairness, so that I don’t up misrepresenting something — even if any refreshing-insight sparsely present in a single video would still have been negligible, given the overall length of that Special.)
“Co-created by a predominantly Israeli team”Say no more.
In fairness..Expecting that any refreshingly-ingenious result could borne out of any undertaking by any high-budget/mainstream project out of ‘Euro Christian’-descended( “sEcULaR”) NATO country, is: Just-another, just-another folly.. And also ambitiously titled as “Fertile Crescent” but to pander to my own _personal mantra,_ mayhaps enough of humility to eventually settle on a far more generic English-language title.After all.. What more could be expected from this Is’rāelī-fronted series on continental Francophone dime, particularly with all of that much bandied-around “production-design” over attention-to-detail for authenticity of accents/dialects/tongues of various characters across regions purportedly upto the post-production stage( precisely: “localisation” aka subtitling) even — instead of the good ol’ transatlantic English-language pop-culture having non-Anglo influenced characters mostly speaking English as their primary-tongue with each other and code-switching sparsely to their purported “first language” as if the characters are themselves treating their own “native language” as an exotic “cool”. But managing to excel in just one department, assuming it can even keep-up — and being the ‘most-Hollywood of non-Hollywood, non-English language entertainment’ you must’ve come across, is hardly enough of a motivator for me. You recall the number of archetypical “Hollywood” tropes about everywhere east of Paris in the “pilot” episode in and of itself.In fact, in all of that uszche PR bluster: Miraculously they let it slip that they brought in not-just one, but 2 French screenwriters to and I quote, “in particular lessen stereotypes about France and the French.” And it’s not just a ‘consulting producer’ type role, either. In fact, there’s a creatively-bizarre title for topic-wide editorial _veto_ over the final-draft of the show’s teleplay scripts.Like, my goodness…!How woefully-incompetent these whole bunch of Is’rāelī( I dunno why the article says “predominantly” instead of ‘all’, since Mr Mansouri could be a Druze) “creators” were, like no.. They were all too satisfied in imposing their own acquired-worldviews and collecting paychecks to go back home, instead of bothering a bit about getting anything beyond languages right, since the subject-matter as a whole doesn’t seem to concern their “State of Tel Avīv” pampered privilege, much.Ahh.. Welp!At least they reportedly filmed the exteriors of Paris over in Morocco as was the case with every single East European & West Asian locale, even.(As if that’s just somehow not yet enough, the interiors of Paris & possibly İstanbul are filmed in Belgium, consisting the clear-minority of overall production-schedule.)This looked like just-another Hollywood propaganda bleeding their hearts for the perennial “predicament” of Is’rāel Armed Forces.(Something which is an indisputable speciality of every single Is’rāelī showrunner whose “thriller” show goes viral, just like all other popular countries’ creatives but without that glowing nucl.. err.. red ‘special status( read baggage)’ of Is’rāel.)⏎Or if anybody reading this still wants to go back to the bliss of all-too-comforting ignorance: A good ol’ “interview”-style PR fluff for this miniseries in that Saūdī regime’s part-owned showbiz-news behemoth aka the most-powerful rival of this site’s network, PMC® in its legacy zine Variety® was — riddled with ‘innocent’ typos in most-awkward of places as if it was actually copyedited by a European who’s still in the beginning stages of learning some variant of International English, just as we’re supposed to believe from that interview and mayhaps, these writers’ past _CV_ that: They just made innocent gaffes in weaving a work they had no mood for authentically executing[ together].