To a Land Unknown is a film shaped by its director’s dual allegiances.
As a man of Palestinian descent (though he now lives in Denmark), Mahdi Fleifel is devoted to telling the stories of his people. But as a cinephile, he seems equally devoted to recreating the magic of the American films he watched growing up in the 1980s.
The result is the story of two Palestinian refugees that combines the unvarnished realism of a documentary with the kind of alternately warm and testy relationship you might find in an American “buddy flick.”
The tale’s setting is Athens, Greece, where Chatila and his cousin Reda (Mahmood Bakri and Aram Sabbah, both excellent) are barely scraping by with the help of petty thefts and, in Reda’s case, paid sexual trysts. Their situation is desperate, but they see it as temporary.
If they can save up enough money, they plan to purchase fake passports and make their way to what they see as the greener pastures of Germany. Once there, they hope to open a café with the help of Chatila’s wife and son, who are now living in a refugee camp in Lebanon.
From the beginning, it’s clear that Chatila is the more ruthless of the two, justifying their illegal activities as the products of dire necessity. Reda is both more soft-hearted and less self-disciplined, struggling to escape the drug addiction that threatens to control him.
Reda and Chatila meet Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa, left), a 13-year-old Palestinian orphan.
The men’s personality differences complicate what is already a difficult quest to escape Athens, but they forge ahead with the help of a 13-year-old Palestinian orphan named Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa) and a lonely Greek woman named Tatiana (Angeliki Papoulia). Later, others are involved as well, though not always by their own choice.
Indeed, the film eventually evolves into a kind of crime caper, though one that bears little resemblance to any caper flick you’ve ever seen. The emphasis is not so much on whether the men’s plot will succeed as it is on just how far they’ll go to achieve their goal.
If there’s one line that sums up To a Land Unknown, it’s one person’s assertion that people who’ve been treated like dogs are apt to attack each other. It helps to explain much of the characters’ behavior, as well as the film’s refusal to condemn them for it.
That thought alone would leave viewers with much to ponder, but then director/co-writer Fleifel adds a development that can only be seen as an homage—an unconscious homage, according to Fleifel—to an Oscar-winning classic from decades past.
Some will disagree, but for me it’s an unwelcome complication, upsetting the film’s delicate balance between stark reality and cinematic tropes. Up until then, however, Fleifel’s full-length debut is an engrossing examination of the lengths desperate people will go to in order to survive.
Rating: 3½ stars (out of 5)
To a Land Unknown (no MPA rating) can be seen in select theaters and is scheduled to open July 18 at Columbus’s Gateway Film Cen
