Editor’s Notice: This evaluate initially was printed through the 2024 Cannes Movie Competition. Watermelon Footage releases “To a Land Unknown” in choose theaters on Friday, July 11, 2025.
The good Palestinian-Danish documentarian Mahdi Fleifel (“A World Not Ours”) leaps efficiently into fiction with a characteristic debut that borrows a story container from “Midnight Cowboy” and a tormented soul that’s all Palestinian.
The movie opens with a quote from the celebrated Palestinian scholar, Edward Stated: “In a means, it’s a type of destiny of Palestinians to not find yourself the place they began, however someplace surprising and much away.” These phrases have been chopping because the second they had been first spoken years in the past, however launched into the world now through the horrific genocide in Gaza, they’ve an additional, determined chew, as one other era is compelled to hunt displacement as the one various to violent dying. Premiering at Cannes on this local weather, Fleifel’s portrait of two particular person characters asks questions that can not be confined to the display. The place do you belong after you may have been pushed out of your homeland? When your existence is criminalized, how can the legal guidelines of so-called civil society apply?
Fleifel drops a pin in Athens, Greece, which represents limbo for Palestinian cousins, Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah). They’ve beforehand made it out of a refugee camp in Lebanon solely to seek out themselves so close to however but so far-off from their desired vacation spot of Germany. “To a Land Unknown” is a social realist drama buoyed by two beautiful central performances, a nuanced portrait of a mercurial male relationship informed with assurance and metal. No matter how absolutely and tenderly the characters are drawn, future is written in nonetheless bolder strokes.
Fleifel matter-of-factly drops us into a lifetime of low-level criminality. The cousins are bag-snatching and shoplifting, saving as much as purchase ID papers and transport to Germany through a blackmarket kingpin. Why Germany is meant to be a promised land is a moot level, it has merely been nominated as such — simply as Moscow was for Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” Florida was to Joe and Ratso in “Midnight Cowboy” and The Nice Valley was to Littlefoot in “The Land Earlier than Time.” The viewers is in on the suspicion that the issues right here will seemingly exist there, and the dramatic irony is amped up on this specific context, as Germany has been draconian in clamping down on Palestine solidarity.
However the cousins don’t know this. As soon as within the promised land, Chatila plans to ship for his spouse Nabila and their 3-year-old youngster, as each are at the moment nonetheless within the refugee camp in Lebanon. They’ll open a restaurant in an Arab-friendly district. Nabila will prepare dinner. Chatila may have an workplace with a giant ashtray. Reda would be the barman and the primary face that clients see. It’s a lovely, tragic, expressive face, with lengthy eyelashes and a drooping unhappiness. He’s each Chatila’s closest ally and his largest legal responsibility, for he acutely feels how far they’re sliding from a “regular” life and has a nasty behavior of spending their hard-earned money on heroin relapses.
A taut script, co-written by Fleifel, Fyzal Boulifa, and Jason McColgan, wastes no time in establishing the story and the stakes, whereas additionally tending to the main points of their lives. An over-populated squat in Athens is probably not a house, however there are nonetheless traces of the house that these males convey wherever they go. Mint tea steams, potatoes fry, Reda sleeps half-naked with a tattoo the form of Palestine seen on his torso. Bakri and Sabbah bristle with life. In distinction with Reda’s hangdog melancholy, Chatila is vitality itself: a steaming drive of targeted vitality that explodes in pissed off cruelty when somebody will get in his means.
These two performers feed off one another in a dance that’s by no means static. They’re from the identical place, they need the identical issues, they forgive one another as a result of who else might they discover to fill that very same position. In contrast to in one million rote and gritty thrillers of yore, there isn’t any shortage of affection on this image. What makes “To a Land Unknown” so highly effective is its fulsomely written and inhabited male characters.
One morning, within the sq. that they use to stake out marks, they meet Malik (Mohammed Alsurafa), a plucky boy from Gaza who desires to make it to Italy to be reside along with his aunt. Afterward in the identical day, Chatila meets a Greek girl, Tatiana (Angeliki Papoulia), who’s a bit of misplaced, a bit of drawn to him. She sees in him what he’s too busy surviving to note: that he’s younger and delightful. He sees in her the citizenship meaning she will be able to journey freely.
As in “A World Not Ours,” no scene is just existed as a approach to transfer from A to B, texture is the means and the top. After Malik helps Reda with promoting on some stolen trainers, the 2 munch on sandwiches. Between mouthfuls, Reda impresses upon him that stealing is incorrect and that he may have a standard life. Every little thing that occurs in Athens shouldn’t be alleged to depend, it’s alleged to be a wipe washer-friendly “earlier than” time. “It’s only a section, it is going to be nothing however a reminiscence,” Nabila tells Chatila over the cellphone. That is the road they inform one another. Typically they even imagine it.
The movie is in fixed negotiation with how a lot struggling we are able to mete out and soak up earlier than our soul collapses, like soggy cardboard. After a semantic dialogue on whether or not “serving to a boy” and “individuals smuggling” are the identical factor, the movie decides that each are true and, moreover, that each will occur. So, the wheels are set in movement to smuggle Malik into Italy, first securing Tatiana’s assist. Her character is filled with its personal tender and arduous locations, she sees by means of Chatila and nonetheless consents to do what he desires, partly out of want, partly by means of the shortage of it and partly as a result of she has negotiated a lower of what Malik’s aunt pays. No character is introduced in a simple mild. Fleifel understands that individuals are teeming plenty of contradictions. Nobody is wholly good or wholly dangerous, though essentially the most delicate amongst us can’t stand the way in which essentially the most calloused amongst us could be.
The movie presents unlawful endeavours with out excuses, save for context. The tragedy for these characters in is that there isn’t any means out however by means of. “You already know, while you begin treating individuals like animals, they begin consuming one another,” says Reda. With the cousins’ individuals smuggling operation in movement, the already-focused story pares proper down and the gripping and heartrending third act unfurls.
Fleifel masterfully tees up the characters and their high-stakes job to the purpose that one can’t advance with out impactful implications for the opposite. There may be ache in retailer for a brand new group of people that have already skilled greater than their honest of share of it, however that is only a byproduct of the story shifting ahead, in line with its personal unstoppable engine. “To a Land Unknown” is a tour-de-force of empathic storytelling, with its style narrative bursting with an overabundance of humanity. The surprising, far-away place that Stated references is expressed absolutely, as each a geographical actuality and a soul in exile.
Grade: A-
“To a Land Unknown” premiered on the 2024 Cannes Movie Competition. Watermelon Footage releases the movie Friday, July 11, 2025.
