In his debut narrative feature, To a Land Unknown, Danish-Palestinian director and documentarian Mahdi Fleifel takes inspiration from New Hollywood films centering men on the margins of society who commit petty crimes and hustle to stay afloat. These avatars for white, male American precarity at the center of these films provided a window into the grittier edges of urban life that audiences at the time responded to, ready and willing as they were to look past the out-of-touch products of Hollywood’s dying studio system. To a Land Unknown, in this spirit, examines the lives of a population willfully ignored by commercial cinema: Palestinian refugees. Fleifel uses familiar genre codes to illuminate the desperate absurdity of statelessness, crafting a tense, reflective drama that is both politically urgent and unsentimentally humanistic.
Chatila (Mahmoud Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) are cousins from the same refugee camp in Lebanon, now scraping by in Athens and working to obtain forged passports to fly to Germany, where they hope to start a more secure life and bring family members. They live hand-to-mouth in a graffiti-strewn building with dozens of other refugees, and they resort to theft and, in Reda’s case, sex work, to earn enough money to purchase their passports. Reda, though, is addicted to heroin, and spends their money on the drug in a relapse. Chatila, the craftier and more decisive of the pair, devises a plan to earn a considerable sum by smuggling a stranded 12-year-old refugee from Gaza, Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), to Italy, where his aunt is waiting for him. He begins an affair with a lonely local woman, Tatiana (Angeliki Papoulia), to convince her to pose as the boy’s mother and take him across the border. When the plan goes awry, the increasingly desperate cousins resort to more extreme measures to escape their transient lives in Athens.
To a Land Unknown is deliberately paced and methodically plotted, with each new plan considered in detail, and each unexpected obstacle affecting Chatila and Reda’s next move. Fleifel, who also wrote the film with Fyzal Boulifa and Jason McColgan, develops the narrative with long scenes of dialogue, incrementally revealing the characters’ individual psychologies and thoroughly laying the groundwork for each new turn in the plot. What slowly emerges is that, despite their best efforts, Chatila and Reda can make no headway in their efforts to move on from their indefinitely waylaid lives — rather, the only changes they can incur are in their own internal senses of morality, with their actions becoming more manipulative and violent as their options narrow. Bakri and Sabbah, in their complex, expressive performances, effectively convey how their characters shift over time: Bakri’s performance grows harsher and more hardened, and Sabbah, playing the more sensitive character, grows correspondingly more emotionally volatile. When they reflect on their hopes and dreams for the future, or when Chatila grows enthusiastic over a new plot to reach Germany, Fleifel locates an empathetic poignancy in the growing futility of their efforts.
Director of photography Thodoros Mihopoulos shoots the urban environment of Athens — the film’s characters are largely confined to crowded streets, with tourist destinations like the Acropolis seeming to exist in a different world — on 16mm film, and with a frame that is blurred and jagged around the edges, giving the film a handcrafted and rough-hewn aesthetic. This aesthetic choice is apt for the subject matter, with the accentuated flaws in the film corresponding with the coarse precarity of their situation. This aesthetic also echoes the film’s New Hollywood inspirations. It particularly brings to mind how Adam Holender visually captured the grimy New York of Midnight Cowboy, which is also the clearest narrative reference point for To a Land Unknown: in their risky efforts to create better lives, hampered by impossible circumstances and addiction, Chatila and Reda echo the characters played by Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman in John Schlesinger’s 1969 film, and the final shots of Fleifel’s film are a near-exact recreation of Midnight Cowboy’s uncompromising conclusion. But To a Land Unknown is not over-reliant on this predecessor; the film is no exercise in nostalgia. If anything, by invoking familiar character types and plot points, Fleifel casts a harsh light on how Palestinian refugees are forced into unstable lives that require extralegal acts simply to stay alive.
Fleifel was, in part, inspired to make To a Land Unknown by the stories of two Palestinian refugees in Athens he came to know: one died of an overdose, while another managed to obtain €20,000 and cross into Macedonia — but only by leaving “five men bound and gagged in [his] basement in Athens.” The events of Fleifel’s film, then, are not simply the stuff of narrative invention, but refer to the events of actual Palestinians’ lives. Fleifel himself comes from a legacy of displacement: his grandparents were forced from their homes during the Nakba by Zionist paramilitaries (Fleifel’s own production company is named Nakba FilmWorks), and his parents were born and raised in a refugee camp in Lebanon, where Fleifel himself also lived for a time as a child. To a Land Unknown opens with an epigraph by Edward Said: “In a way, it’s sort of the fate of Palestinians, not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away.” In crafting this small-scale, thriller-inflected drama, Fleifel invokes this concise summation of Palestinian life. The stories of Chatila and Reda are compelling narratively, but they carry a weight beyond the scope of the film as symbolic microcosms of the devastating, disorienting effects of generations of displacement.
DIRECTOR: Mahdi Fleifel; CAST: Mahmoud Bakri, Aram Sabbagh, Mohammad Aisurafa, Angeliki Papoulia; DISTRIBUTOR: Watermelon Pictures; IN THEATERS: July 11; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 46 min.
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