Palestinian stories, according to Mahdi Fleifel, are always “stranger than fiction” yet too often are told only in documentaries.

Now, after a career making factual films, the Danish-Palestinian’s debut feature, To a Land Unknown, will be released in the UK on 14 February.

It follows two cousins stranded “in purgatory” in Greece while attempting to reach Germany. The film, the culmination of a 10-year struggle to secure funding, was made in just 29 days, and premiered at Cannes.

“How often do you see Palestinian stories in fiction? Usually, we’re reduced to documentary material,” says Fleifel.

“The winners in history are the ones who get to tell their story,” he says. “This is why yearly you have these humongous $100m productions; a Churchill bio, an Oppenheimer bio. Who’s going to give you the kind of money to tell a Palestinian story? And who’s going to put it in the theatres?”

In Fleifel’s film, Palestinians Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) are stuck, like many refugees and migrants, in Athens without papers to advance any further into Europe and start scheming to steal money for fake passports. Reda’s heroin addiction throws their plans into chaos as the plot takes a dark turn and transforms into a gripping thriller.

“Someone wrote me an email and said, ‘After watching your film, I feel as though those guys are part of my family.’ And I think that’s the power of cinema when it really works.”

Growing up, Fleifel was captivated by John Grisham’s US courtroom dramas, believing that studying law could allow him to “speak truth to power”. But a “boring” school internship at a court shattered that perception and he told his parents he wanted to become a film-maker. “They were heartbroken,” he says.

Fleifel was born in Dubai in 1979. His passion for storytelling was shaped by his early exposure to his father’s home videos and his uncle’s recordings of life in Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp in Lebanon, where Fleifel spent part of his childhood.

“My father – who worked for Kodak – recorded us a lot and didn’t really regard age restriction, so I was watching films like The Doberman Gang and Terminator and Jaws from age five.”

The family moved to Denmark in 1988. Fleifel initially trained as a fiction director in the UK at the National Film and Television School but later embarked on documentary film-making. His first major success, A World Not Ours (2012), emerged from 150 hours of footage he took in Ain al-Hilweh.

The film became a festival success, and made him enough money to set up a production company, Nakba FilmWorks, in London.

Subsequent documentaries Xenos (2014) and A Man Returned (2016), which won a Silver Bear at the 2016 Berlinale, also focus on Ain al-Hilweh and the struggles of young Palestinian men grappling with displacement.

Fleifel is particularly influenced by the trauma of his grandparents, who lost everything in the Nakba of 1948 when more than 700,000 Palestinians were pushed off their land by Zionist paramilitaries and then by the Israeli military.

“I know deep down that we were robbed in broad daylight. And that there is a great injustice going on till this day. And what’s happening now is very ugly. It’s the darkest of the darkest truths about humanity.”

Fleifel sees no romanticism in film-making, describing it as a “sad predicament”, in which most of his time is devoted to relentless money raising.

“I spend 2% of my life on actual film-making and 98% hustling because I’m not doing this to sell popcorn, or only to entertain.”

He says he also avoids romanticising the refugee experience, and is committed to characters who reflect the ambivalence and complexities of human nature.

Reda in To a Land Unknown is based on a real-life Reda featured in his documentary, who died of a heroin overdose.

“I remember some people were reading the script and were asking, ‘Do you really want to portray your characters as thieves and hustlers?’ Of course, people are going to watch it and say, ‘Well, look, this is what happens when these guys come to Europe.’ But people are fundamentally alike. These characters, in a different world or life, could easily be you.”

Making a film about Palestinians, he says, “is always going to be an act of resistance”.

“I’m not a Danish film-maker making a film in Danish about Danes in Denmark. I’m a film-maker in exile making films about exiles in exile.”

• To a Land Unknown is released on 14 February