To A Land Unknown – the confident feature debut from Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel – is at its core a tale of displacement and alienation. Ostensibly a taut crime thriller, the film is instead most successful as an intimate character study (thanks in large part to superlative performances from Mahmood Bakri and newcomer Aram Sabbah). Mining his own history as a refugee, and drawing upon his experience as a documentary filmmaker, Fleifel turns our gaze to a group of Palestinian refugees struggling to survive on the fringes of Athenian society, and shines a much-needed light into the corners of existence that so many of us tend to look away from.
When we meet Chatila (Bakri) and Reda (Sabbah), they are barely eking out a living as low stakes con men, living in a run-down squat, and doing their best to stash away enough money to get them to Germany, where they dream of settling down and opening a café with Chatila’s wife Nabila. Reda – a recovering drug addict – is the more fragile of the two, relying on his more confident cousin to call the shots. Chatila, outwardly handsome and cocksure, clearly feels a great deal of responsibility for Reda, and suffers greatly under that burden of care.
After a botched purse snatching attempt in the park, the pair is approached by a young boy named Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), a fellow Palestinian trapped in Athenian limbo. Only thirteen years old and trying to reach his aunt in Italy, he’s been stranded by an unscrupulous smuggler with no way to reach his final destination. Chatila tries his best to shake him off, but Malik is highly persistent, and hounds them until they agree to bring him back to the squat they share with a group of similarly undocumented refugees.
Fliefel has a keen eye for detail, and the revelation of this hidden home is one of my favourite moments in the film. Darting through a network of dingy alleyways that appear to lead to nowhere, the group suddenly emerges into a little secret garden, populated with people just like them, trying to survive in any way they can, hiding in plain view. When they arrive, Chatila is enraged to find Reda’s former dealer holding court, and quickly spirits his charges away before they can get themselves into too much trouble.
Prowling the park later that night, we meet a different Chatila as he chats with his wife and young son, left behind at a refugee camp in Lebanon. This Chatila is warm, vulnerable, and open, and attracts the attention of a local woman named Tatiana (longtime Lanthimos favourite Angeliki Papoulia). It is fascinating to watch Chatila subtly shapeshift throughout the film, becoming whatever version of himself the situation demands, a testament to Bakri’s talent as a performer. While he initially plays the wholesome family man, giving Tatiana the brush off, he’ll have no qualms in seducing her later when it suits his needs.
In the meantime, he begs off to drum up some more “business,” only to find that in a moment of weakness, Reda has blown all of their savings on drugs, putting them right back at square one. Furious and desperate to get out of Athens, Chatila hatches a scheme to capitalize on Malik’s predicament, using Tatiana to help them smuggle him to Italy in exchange for a fat payout from the boy’s aunt. For a while, all seems to be going beautifully to plan… until it all falls apart.
Determined to get them out of this mess, Chatila becomes increasingly volatile, spiraling completely out of control as he hatches an even more outlandish scheme than the first one. It is at this point that the film, in my view, begins to falter and loses momentum. Abandoning the careful character work and world-building of the first half, the plot becomes increasingly convoluted, stretching the bounds of credulity. However, despite the shakiness of its plotting, the film is a remarkably assured work, and deeply haunting in its quietest moments, gently questioning the bargains we make with our own humanity, all in the name of survival.
To A Land Unknown is currently screening at the Red Sea International Film Festival.
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