A Drama About Younger Palestinians in Exile

The story behind the making of Palestinian-Danish director Mahdi Fleifel’s second function, To a Land Unknown, might be as intriguing because the movie itself. Shot on the fly in Greece, with manufacturing starting precisely a month after the Hamas assaults of October 7^th, the film was one way or the other accomplished in time to premiere at Cannes simply over six months later.

Which may be one thing of a document by way of delivering a function, however it additionally speaks to the precarious and unstable scenario the movie is depicting: that of Palestinian refugees caught in Athens en path to someplace else, caught in a purgatory between a house they’ll’t return to and a brand new one they don’t know.

For greatest mates Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah), the heroes of Fleifel’s melancholic, shaggy-dog road film, that purgatory has been happening for a while. Once we first see the 2 20somethings, they’re hanging out in a park doing nothing, till we notice they’re about to steal a girl’s purse. They’ve few sources and no prospects of employment, so their solely aim is to rob sufficient to buy faux passports and transfer to Germany, the place life might be higher.

Holed up in a graffiti-filled squat occupied by different migrants, they lounge round within the day and kill time nonetheless they’ll, whether or not it’s skateboarding by the town or, in Reda’s case, taking pictures up heroin. Fleifel’s depiction of their world is each genuine and bleak: These are younger males with passions and goals like the remainder of us — Chatila additionally has a spouse and son caught in a Lebanese refugee camp — however they’ve been rendered motionless by the scenario in Palestine (although not particularly Gaza, which isn’t alluded to within the movie) and strict European immigration insurance policies working towards them.

There’s a Midnight Cowboy-aspect to the story of two down-and-out dudes making an attempt to make it out of the town towards someplace higher, and the truth that Reda turns tips within the park with the intention to pay for his drug behavior is one thing straight out of Nineteen Seventies New York. Likewise, the grainy 16mm images of Thodoris Mihopoulos looks like a throwback to a different period, when motion pictures had been made off-the-cuff with just some actors and places.

Fleifel channels that vibrant city power all through a lot of the movie, although there are some longueurs within the second half {that a} tighter edit might repair. A plot does finally kick in when the 2 mates cross paths with a 13-year-old Palestinian child, Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), who’s making an attempt to affix an aunt in Italy. In what can solely be described as an act of pure humanity, Chatila and Reda determine to assist him out, even when it means suspending their very own pipe goals of attending to Germany and opening a café collectively.

At that time, To a Land Unknown takes a decidedly darker flip, with Chatila enlisting a Greek alcoholic (Angeliki Papoulia) to escort Malik on his flight, though the girl is clearly to not be trusted. Whereas the chums wait to see if their plan labored, they provide you with one other scheme to pose as smugglers and steal cash from a trio of Syrian refugees hoping to make it out as properly. It’s actually a dog-eat-dog world the place males with good intentions resort to crime, violence and even torture when there’s no different resolution. Fleifel by no means shies away from the lasting damages that exile may cause, even when one does finally make it out.

A lot of the movie is ready across the squats and streets of Athens, and we by no means as soon as go to any well-known ruins or vacationer websites of the Greek capital. Sooner or later Chatila asks Malik if he’s ever seen the Acropolis, to which the boy responds: “Sure, on a regular basis, it’s proper there,” which means he might care much less about it when his whole life hangs within the stability.

That doesn’t imply To a Land Unknown lacks tradition, should memorably when somebody recites a number of verses by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish which can be initially mistaken for rap lyrics. It’s a telling second, particularly because it describes the very scenario that Chatila, Reda and so many different refugees themselves in. For all of the working, skating and scheming the 2 mates do within the metropolis, it looks like they’ve been condemned to without end stay in place.