To A Land Unknown review – a brilliantly acted tale of moral complexity

Set in the Greek capital, Danish-Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel’s fiction debut focuses on Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and his cousin Reda (Aram Sabbah), two Palestinian refugees who, having fled a Lebanese refugee camp, are doing everything in their power to source the necessary funds head to Germany. For Chatila, Athens is pure purgatory, an experience that speaks to the arduous nature of placelessness, for the displaced, the dispossessed, and those who are demonised for daring to seek a better life. For the camera, Athens is no simple layover, its graffiti-covered streets captured in beautiful 16mm by Thodoris Mihopoulos’ controlled cinematography.

With his eyes set intently upon the future, Chatila keeps reminding himself that soon, Athens will be nothing but a distant memory. The pipedream is to open a café in one of Berlin’s Arab neighbourhoods, with his wife (who is still in Lebanon along with their young son) as the chef, and Reda behind the bar – but this dream can only become reality by getting their hands on enough cash to pay the experienced trafficker Marwan (Mondher Rayahneh) to secure their escape.

While Chatila clings onto the promise of a life in Germany, Reda’s way of seeking temporary relief is through more dangerous means. The precarious material circumstances he finds himself in have resulted in a heroin addiction, and when he blows all their savings on a fix, their escape from Greece feels all the more intangible, so Chatila comes up with an elaborate plan involving smuggling a 13-year-old Palestinian boy who ends up stranded in Athens while trying to get to his aunt in Italy.

The film is at its most compelling when it confronts the need for survival; when it lays bare the complex set of circumstances that lead migrants to turn on one another, to reproduce the violence of their very own oppression in order to get themselves out of harm’s way. In this sense, Fleifel resists convenient calls to empathy, but beyond making us understand what lies behind these characters’ motivations, he is committed to transforming his film into a gritty thriller, and builds a narrative in which those subject to the migrant regime seem to have no option but to forgo their humanity. A more political call for solidarity and collective resistance (especially in the context of an ongoing genocide) would have added a texture that’s necessary to combat the neoliberal individualism and the distrust that has become a defining characteristic of our era.

Despite all this, the presence of Palestine is felt strongly, whether it’s in the shape of a tattoo on Reda’s body, or in the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish as recited by the drug dealer/poet Abu Love (Mouataz Alshaltouh). The film opens with one quote by Edward Said (“It’s sort of the fate of Palestinians, not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away”), yet as it draws to a close, it reminds me of another: “Exile is predicated on the existence of, love for, and bond with, one’s native place; what is true of all exile is not that home and love of home are lost, but that loss is inherent in the very existence of both.”