At least two of this year’s Academy Awards reveal that Hollywood values realistic art as well as high-tech sensationalism and animated escapist fantasies. Those Oscars went to movies likely to make viewers uneasy, proving that cinema at its best is not pitched to the dumbest common denominator. The winners in the documentary and foreign-language categories, both of which have played in Santa Cruz lately, are among the most seriously unsettling films I’ve seen in years. Difficult to watch yet irresistibly compelling, they invited me to think hard about the implications of at least two contemporary crises.

Filmed between 2019 and 2023 — before the horrendous assault on Israel by Hamas and Israel’s retaliatory devastation of Gaza — “No Other Land” documents the recurrent demolition of homes in a small West Bank Palestinian village by the Israeli military, not on account of any militant activity but to clear the landscape for tank training. A collaborative effort of a small team of young Israeli and Palestinian first-time filmmakers, this low-budget cinema-verité project reveals the cruelly arbitrary nature of attempts by Israel to dispossess Palestinian civilians of land they have inhabited for generations.

To see stark footage of bulldozers commanded by Israeli soldiers knocking over families’ homes and armed settlers aggressively trying to intimidate women and children; to witness those families driven from their land to live in caves yet defiantly rebuilding their houses — only to have them demolished again — is to understand why the state of Israel is widely reviled in the international community for its egregious violations of human rights.

There is no question that antisemitism is also a widespread pathology, but Israel’s routine acts of aggression — as documented in “No Other Land” against a tiny out-of-the-way West Bank village, just one small example among many larger ones — makes me almost ashamed of my Jewish heritage, which without my consent is associated with the brutal policies of the Jewish state that violate the bedrock Jewish principle of justice. Israel alienates Jews and gentiles everywhere and only inflames more antisemitism with its systematic attacks on innocent Palestinians in order to take possession of their land.

The Brazilian drama “I’m Still Here,” based on the true story of a comfortable middle-class family in early-1970s Rio de Janeiro whose father is taken from his home and disappeared by agents of Brazil’s military dictatorship, is also a tale of state terrorism imposed in the name of fighting terrorism. Viewed in the light of our current American government’s rapid descent into autocracy, the movie is a chilling reminder of where unchecked executive power can inexorably lead.

Authoritarians brook no dissent and respect no laws that limit their own authority. In Brazil’s case, that meant ripping families apart and murdering people in pursuit of any form of dissidence; in ours, it means the “anti-woke” censorship of American history, the suppression of free speech and the prohibition of political protest (as in the equation of any criticism of Israel or pro-Palestinian sentiment with antisemitism) on the slippery slope toward forcefully shutting down any deviation from official “patriotic” white-supremacist orthodoxy.

In these unnerving and disorienting times in the United States, films like “No Other Land” and “I’m Still Here” show the kinds of state abuses historically practiced elsewhere that are increasingly plausible here as the Trump administration tightens its grip on civil society. Threats against political activists, the purge of nonpartisan government agencies and the defunding of science are just a few examples among many. As immigrant families are displaced and torn apart without due process, it remains to be seen how far our rulers will go and how we’ll defend the fragile safety of our homes, our privacy and our personal freedom.

Stephen Kessler’s column appears on Saturdays.