Mahdi Fleifel’s debut feature, the documentary “A World Not Ours,” became an unexpected festival sensation in 2012. The film offered a warm, often humorous, and deeply compassionate look at the Ein El-Helweh Palestinian refugee camp in South Lebanon, where Fleifel’s parents were born. It highlighted the frustrations of a stateless generation of young men with no homeland and limited prospects, except to join the growing number of refugees trying to enter Europe. The documentary won numerous awards worldwide.
Since then, Fleifel has created several short films, but it took 12 years for him to return with another feature. His latest film, “To a Land Unknown,” premiered at Cannes as the only Palestinian film in the lineup and is set to close the Galway Film Fleadh on July 13, with Palestine as the country of focus this year.
While “To a Land Unknown” marks Fleifel’s narrative debut, it almost feels like a continuation of his award-winning documentary. The film follows two young Palestinian refugees stranded in Athens, desperate to reach Germany.
“The idea for this film really came around 2011 when I went to Athens for the first time to follow my friend who was in ‘A World Not Ours,’” Fleifel explains. “But when I arrived there, it was like a whole new version of ‘A World Not Ours’ opened up, with these Palestinian refugees, mostly young men who had tried to leave the camps in Lebanon and Syria and make it to Europe.”
Fleifel was initially inspired by the 1962 novel “Men in the Sun,” in which a group of Palestinian refugees leave their camps to work in Kuwait but end up stranded in the desert. “And I just thought, Athens is this new urban desert. Nothing has changed,” he said.
However, as he began formulating the idea, Fleifel became disillusioned with the increasing prevalence of refugee stories on screens. He didn’t want to just add to the noise. At one point, he gave up entirely and went off to university to start a course in rhetorical studies, but he lasted only two months. “I found myself with a load of 20-year-olds and just thought, ‘This isn’t going to work,’” he says. So he picked up the pieces and got back to it. In the end, he shot “To a Land Unknown” on the fly in Greece in November 2023, just six months before its Cannes premiere.
While the film centers on refugees, “To a Land Unknown” is far from most recent dramas about immigration. Fleifel wanted to pay homage to his favorite cinema, the “early Martin Scorsese” and Brian De Palma 1970s New York films. He crafted a heist thriller set in Greece where the main protagonists aren’t necessarily the good guys.
The plot idea actually came from one of the refugees he was initially following in Athens. Fleifel says one of the four he was in touch with made it to Germany, another got to Sweden but went off the radar, while another tragically died of an overdose in Greece. But one landed in London, and when Fleifel asked him how he managed to get there, he told him how he’d crossed the border into Macedonia with 20,000 Euros but had left “five men bound and gagged in our basement flat in Athens.” Fleifel was hooked and got him to explain the full story over a weekend. “I was like, oh my god, what is this? Is it ‘Trainspotting’? Is it ‘The Great Escape’?”
And so “To a Land Unknown” sees its two lead characters — one of whom has a drug addiction, inspired by his friend who died in Greece — hatching a plan that involves posing as smugglers and taking hostages to pay for fake passports and get out of Greece.
For Fleifel, alongside making a film that is a tribute to his filmmaking heroes, he also hopes that “To a Land Unknown” makes people connect with Palestinians on a human level, especially given the current news.
“The people trying to flee Gaza are like the ones we meet in Athens. All they want is to have a better life and, like us, they have dreams and fears and hopes. But they’re stuck.”
The film’s production design adds to its somber mood. Chatila and Reda, the main characters, occupy an overpopulated, dilapidated corner of Athens where many others from the Middle East sleep. The area is populated by drug dealers, enforcers, and other shady characters. The film suddenly shifts, turning into an intense kidnapping thriller. Even with the change, however, it remains grounded and emotional, balancing those genre conceits with a noted humanism: we see just how far Chatila is willing to go to accomplish his dreams.
“To a Land Unknown” is a film whose tension escalates from the myriad setbacks experienced by its characters. They encounter Malik, a young boy left in Greece without any parents, trying to travel to his aunt in Italy. For a while, Malik’s presence creates some warm scenes between the trio, offering this bleak story some of its few moments of joy. Yet this makeshift family doesn’t last; Chatila hatches a plan to scrounge up cash by returning the child to his aunt through Tatiana, a tenacious Greek woman he is dating. It’s a simple scheme with plenty of complications. And it’s the complications that give “To a Land Unknown” a biting spirit. Because in a world where the political, emotional, and legal deck is stacked against refugees, failure is ever-present.
Source: Variety
