There are strong performances and storytelling energy in this fiction feature debut from Danish-Palestinian film-maker Mahdi Fleifel, a graduate of the UK’s National Film and Television School, known for his 2012 documentary A World Not Ours, about the Lebanese refugee camp where he was born. To a Land Unknown is a drama-thriller with real suspense, but also a melancholy showcase for Mahmoud Darwish’s poem Praise for the High Shadow.
The setting is modern-day Athens, where Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) is a watchful Palestinian refugee, with enough money from the Greek state to eat and charge his phone, drifting on the margins of crime and dreaming of escaping to Germany with the wife and son he left behind in Lebanon. Bakri’s excellent performance shows Chatila to be smart, personable, manipulative and ruthless, always on the lookout for ways to get money for a fake passport. He uses his pal Reda (Aram Sabbah), a fellow Palestinian refugee, in scams to rob people, and also relies on the money that Reda makes cottaging with Athenian guys; he is disgusted by consensual sex work, but stealing old ladies’ handbags is quite all right. He is also casually racist towards Greeks because they are not like the proper white northern Europeans he longs to live among in Germany, an attitude which betrays a strange self-hate: “The Greeks … they look like us Arabs.”
With a hustler’s predatory instinct, Chatila flirts instinctively with a lonely Greek woman called Tatiana (played by Greek star Angeliki Papoulia, from Yorgos Lanthimos’s Dogtooth), and befriends Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), a 13-year-old kid from Gaza, convincing himself and Reda that he is genuinely concerned for this little boy. Chatila cooks up a plan for Tatiana and Malik to put themselves in danger so that he and Reda can get money from Malik’s aunt in Italy and live in Tatiana’s Athens flat, a plan that evolves into betraying and brutalising his fellow refugees. People are there to be used and forgotten about: cleverly, Fleifel allows us to invest in characters who are to disappear from the story, so we too can experience the emotional wasteland in which Chatila lives.
This is what his eternal stateless condition has brought him to; this is what a survivor does. But if, even now, he is not yet callous enough to succeed, then perhaps it means his success isn’t compatible with his humanity, battered and eroded as that now is. A smart, well-made film.
• To a Land Unknown is in UK cinemas from 14 February.
