To a Land Unknown: A Taut Refugee Anti-Thriller Set in the Mean Streets of Athens
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
“Too long a sacrifice can make a stone of the heart,” wrote William Butler Yeats, in his poem about the Irish revolution, Easter 1916, reflecting on how prolonged oppression can create both resolute purpose and crush human empathy.
That’s the central theme of To a Unknown Land, Mahdi Fleifel’s propulsive anti-thriller about two Palestinian cousins hustling on the streets of Athens, the gateway for refugees from the Mideast to Europe.
The cunning Chatila (Mahmoud Bakri), who has left a wife and child behind in a Lebanese refugee camp, and the more fragile Reda (Aram Sabbah), share a room in a crowded squat. They spend their days on the streets, smoking hand-rolled cigarettes and engaging in petty thievery. To Chatila’s disgust, Reda also occasionally engages in prostitution with men in the park and scores heroin from a fellow migrant dealer.
In the opening scene, Chatila and Reda — dressed in cheap hip-hop garb with tank tops, gold neck chains and tattoos — are sitting in a quiet residential park. A nearby boy jumps up to pluck an orange from a tree. The two men see a heavy-set, middle-aged woman with a large purse sit down on a bench. Chatila identifies her as a promising target.
In a few moments, Reda stages an accident on a skateboard as a distraction, giving Chatila a chance to snatch the woman’s purse. The payoff is a paltry five-Euro note. The gentle Reda wonders if they should return the woman’s bottle of pills to her.
The petty crime has not gone unnoticed. The boy with the orange has seen the theft and recognized the men as fellow Palestinians — he’s from Gaza — and he follows them and asks for help. (Though the film began shooting a month after the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attacks, there’s no reference in the script to the conflict or Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza enclave or the displacement of its population).
Chatila advises the kid, Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), to go to the police, though they both know that will mean his deportation. Later, the sympathetic Reda helps Malik find a place to sleep and Chatila sees the nuisance child as a potential opportunity.
What unfolds is a series of escalating and increasingly risky and debased scams masterminded by Chatila (in a finely tuned performance by Bakri), who keeps us torn between empathy for his desperation and revulsion at his abuse of other people.
When Chatila learns that Malik is trying to get to his aunt who lives in Italy, he starts planning on how to get money from the woman. To enact his plan, he enlists a heavy-drinking lonely Greek woman, Tatiana who he picks up in a park. (She’s played with a mix of fragility and cynicism by Angeliki Papoulia of Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth and The Lobster).
Chatila persuades the woman to pose as the boy’s mother to fly him to Italy. When the plan doesn’t work out as expected, Chatila seizes on a new scam involving human trafficking of other migrants, that escalates into kidnapping and worse.
Behind his ruthless plans, Chatila has a tender, protective side, and a dream to raise enough money to buy fake documentation from a local illegal migrant trafficker to settle in Germany and set up a café in an Arab community.
Chatila can cook, and he hopes to send for his wife and young son to join them. Reda, he promises, will be there to serve at the bar and greet the customers with his “big stupid face.” This is a story that Reda likes to hear, like Lenny in John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, hearing about the farm and pet rabbits.
In his anxious phone calls to his wife Nabila in Lebanon, Chatila also reveals the raw wound of his self-loathing: “My love, do you know how we live here? We hustle people, we steal, we’re like animals. Worse than animals. We’re criminals, Nabila.”
To a Land Unknown is unquestionably topical. It’s also rooted in a well-known movie tradition, films that are empathetic portraits of low-level urban criminals struggling for survival and dignity.
The film’s Danish Palestinian director Fleifel — who profiled the Lebanese refugee camps like the one where he was raised in his 2012 documentary A World Not Ours — has a been open about his admiration for the New Hollywood films such films as Martin Scorsese’s 1973 Means Streets, with Harvey Keitel as a minor criminal and Robert De Niro as his self-destructive cousin.
To a Land Unknown clearly borrows from John Schlesinger’s Oscar-winning Midnight Cowboy (1969), starring Jon Voigt as a naïve sex worker and Dustin Hoffman as his ailing petty con manfriend.
Though Fleifel declines to describe himself as a political filmmaker, the absence of a Palestinian home is the pain that drives the narrative.
We see it in glimpses of the tattooed map of Palestine on Chatila’s body and hear it in the words of the late Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), recited by a drug-dealing self-styled outlaw rapper named Abu Love (Mouataz Alshaltouh): “The mask has fallen from the mask. You have no brother, no friends and no fortress. Neither water, nor medicine, nor sky nor sail, no going forth nor turning back.”
To a Land Unknown. Directed by Mahdi Fleifel and written by Mahdi Fleifel, Fyzal Boulifa and Jason McColgan. Starring Mahmoud Bakri and Aram Sabbah. In theatres July 11 at the TIFF Lightbox (Toronto), July 18 at the Mayfair Theatre (Ottawa), July 25 at Cinémateque (Montreal). Also at: TIFF Lightbox, Cinema Du Parc, Montreal, QC, July 18; Cinema Beaubien, Montreal, QC, July 18; Cinémathèque Québécoise, Montreal, QC, July 18; VIFF Centre, Vancouver, BC, July 18; Lady of the Lake Theatre, Gimli, July 23; Asper Theatre, Gimli, MB, July 25; Dave Barber Cinematheque, Winnipeg, MB, Aug. 1; Sudbury Indie Cinema, Greater Sudbury, ON, Aug. 8.