The sensible Palestinian-Danish documentarian Mahdi Fleifel (“A World Not Ours”) leaps efficiently into fiction with a function debut that borrows a story container from “Midnight Cowboy” and a tormented soul that’s all Palestinian.
The movie opens with a quote from the celebrated Palestinian scholar, Edward Stated: “In a manner, it’s a type of destiny of Palestinians to not find yourself the place they began, however someplace surprising and much away.” These phrases have been chopping because the second they had been first spoken years in the past, however launched into the world now in the course of the horrific battle in Gaza, they’ve an additional, determined chunk, as one other era is pressured to hunt displacement as the one different to violent loss of life. Premiering at Cannes on this local weather, Fleifel’s portrait of two particular person characters asks questions that can’t be confined to the display. The place do you belong after you might have been pushed out of your homeland? When your existence is criminalized, how can the legal guidelines of so-called civil society apply?
Fleifel drops a pin in Athens, Greece, which represents limbo for Palestinian cousins, Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah). They’ve beforehand made it out of a refugee camp in Lebanon solely to search out themselves so close to however but so far-off from their desired vacation spot of Germany. “To a Land Unknown” is a social realist drama buoyed by two attractive central performances, a nuanced portrait of a mercurial male relationship informed with assurance and metal. Regardless of how totally and tenderly the characters are drawn, future is written in nonetheless bolder strokes.
Fleifel matter-of-factly drops us into a lifetime of low-level criminality. The cousins are bag-snatching and shoplifting, saving as much as purchase ID papers and transport to Germany by way of a blackmarket kingpin. Why Germany is meant to be a promised land is a moot level, it has merely been nominated as such — simply as Moscow was for Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” Florida was to Joe and Ratso in “Midnight Cowboy” and The Nice Valley was to Littlefoot in “The Land Earlier than Time.” The viewers is in on the suspicion that the issues right here will doubtless exist there, and the dramatic irony is amped up on this explicit context, as Germany has been draconian in clamping down on Palestine solidarity.
However the cousins don’t know this. As soon as within the promised land, Chatila plans to ship for his spouse Nabila and their 3-year-old little one, as each are at the moment nonetheless within the refugee camp in Lebanon. They’ll open a restaurant in an Arab-friendly district. Nabila will cook dinner. Chatila could have an workplace with an enormous ashtray. Reda would be the barman and the primary face that clients see. It’s a stunning, tragic, expressive face, with lengthy eyelashes and a drooping disappointment. He’s each Chatila’s closest ally and his largest legal responsibility, for he acutely feels how far they’re sliding from a “regular” life and has a foul behavior of spending their hard-earned money on heroin relapses.
A taut script, co-written by Fleifel, Fyzal Boulifa, and Jason McColgan, wastes no time in organising the story and the stakes, whereas additionally tending to the small print of their lives. An over-populated squat in Athens is probably not a house, however there are nonetheless traces of the house that these males carry wherever they go. Mint tea steams, potatoes fry, Reda sleeps half-naked with a tattoo the form of Palestine seen on his torso. Bakri and Sabbah bristle with life. In distinction with Reda’s hangdog melancholy, Chatila is vitality itself: a steaming pressure of targeted power that explodes in pissed off cruelty when somebody will get in his manner.
These two performers feed off one another in a dance that’s by no means static. They’re from the identical place, they need the identical issues, they forgive one another as a result of who else might they discover to fill that very same function. In contrast to in 1,000,000 rote and gritty thrillers of yore, there isn’t any shortage of affection on this image. What makes “To a Land Unknown” so highly effective is its fulsomely written and inhabited male characters.
One morning, within the sq. that they use to stake out marks, they meet Malik (Mohammed Alsurafa), a plucky boy from Gaza who needs to make it to Italy to be stay together with his aunt. In a while in the identical day, Chatila meets a Greek lady, Tatiana (Angeliki Papoulia), who’s a bit of misplaced, a bit of drawn to him. She sees in him what he’s too busy surviving to note: that he’s younger and exquisite. He sees in her the citizenship meaning she will be able to journey freely.
As in “A World Not Ours,” no scene is just existed as a technique to transfer from A to B, texture is the means and the top. After Malik helps Reda with promoting on some stolen trainers, the 2 munch on sandwiches. Between mouthfuls, Reda impresses upon him that stealing is unsuitable and that he could have a traditional life. All the pieces that occurs in Athens just isn’t imagined to rely, it’s imagined to be a wipe washer-friendly “earlier than” time. “It’s only a section, it is going to be nothing however a reminiscence,” Nabila tells Chatila over the telephone. That is the road they inform one another. Typically they even consider it.
The movie is in fixed negotiation with how a lot struggling we are able to mete out and absorb earlier than our soul collapses, like soggy cardboard. After a semantic dialogue on whether or not “serving to a boy” and “individuals smuggling” are the identical factor, the movie decides that each are true and, moreover, that each will occur. So, the wheels are set in movement to smuggle Malik into Italy, first securing Tatiana’s assist. Her character is filled with its personal mushy and laborious locations, she sees by way of Chatila and nonetheless consents to do what he needs, partly out of want, partly by way of the shortage of it and partly as a result of she has negotiated a reduce of what Malik’s aunt can pay. No character is introduced in a simple mild. Fleifel understands that persons are teeming lots of contradictions. Nobody is wholly good or wholly unhealthy, though probably the most delicate amongst us can’t stand the best way probably the most calloused amongst us will be.
The movie presents unlawful endeavours with out excuses, save for context. The tragedy for these characters in is that there isn’t any manner out however by way of. “, while you begin treating individuals like animals, they begin consuming one another,” says Reda. With the cousins’ individuals smuggling operation in movement, the already-focused story pares proper down and the gripping and heartrending third act unfurls.
Fleifel masterfully tees up the characters and their high-stakes job to the purpose that one can’t advance with out impactful implications for the opposite. There’s ache in retailer for a brand new group of people that have already skilled greater than their honest of share of it, however that is only a byproduct of the story shifting ahead, in line with its personal unstoppable engine. “To a Land Unknown” is a tour-de-force of empathic storytelling, with its style narrative bursting with an overabundance of humanity. The surprising, far-away place that Stated references is expressed totally, as each a geographical actuality and a soul in exile.
Grade: A-
“To a Land Unknown” premiered on the 2024 Cannes Movie Pageant. It’s at the moment in search of U.S. distribution.