To A Land Unknown ★★★

Released: 14 February 2025

Director: Mahdi Fleifel

Starring: Mahmood Bakri, Aram Sabbagh

Encased in this suspense-filled, tension-ridden tale from Mahdi Fleifel, To A Land Unknown is a film about desperation, destruction and deceit. Following two Palestinian refugees who find themselves displaced in Athens. Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbagh) drift and dream through their days disgusted by those around them as well as their own situation. Driven towards the hope of a better life in Germany with their families, who are currently stuck in refugee camps in Lebanon after Palestinian displacement.

Fleifel does what any good filmmaker should, and that’s taking a story that needs to be told and turning it into one we never expected to hear.

When we hear that there’s a Palestinian film to watch, we assume the story will be defined by its relationship to the genocide at the hands of Israelis. For Fleifel, it seems to be more empowering and more authentic to portray the Palestinian refugee as fallible, human and above all, capable of change.

Although the film sometimes feels like a never-ending tragedy with no sign of light at the end of the tunnel, this is supposedly an accurate reflection of what devastation is and what people like Chatila and Reda go through after having been expelled from their homeland. There is significant praise to be sung for the way Fleifel depicts the male human condition, not excluding or romanticising the refugee through the process of telling this usually unheard side of the Palestinian story.

There is some fascinatingly well-crafted dark humour that lines the film and it makes the relationship between Chatila and Reda seem more natural and realistic, which is probably an ode to the documentary filmmaking experience that Fleifel is more experienced in, having previously won a Silver Bear for his previous work.

Although it’s effortless direction from Fleifel, exquisitely tangible and real performances from Mahmood Bakri and Aram Sabbagh, there’s a few occasions in the film the land they’re in feels a little too unknown. For our characters to be dragged down so much by the restrictions of the devolved Athenian streets that they roam, yet for the audience to experience so little of their social exile other than petty crime and drug usage singling them out, makes for somewhat alienating viewing.

Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that there is an incredibly timely reason for this film to exist in UK cinemas at a time where political notions of a real-life ceasefire in Gaza wouldn’t even begin to reach the tragedies of our fictional Chatila and Reda. Palestinians and their stories have long spanned much more than the legacy of the Nakba, the settler violence and the lifelong displacement: Fleifel shines a light on the uneven ways their histories just out of place in cities they’re not welcomed in, on big screens where they are praised.