A pair of desperate Palestinians: ‘We’re getting out, no matter what’

Photo: Mahmood Bakri as Chatila in To A Land Unknown

Daniel Nelson

Two Palestinians scrabble for survival in a run-down area of Athens, desperately trying to earn enough to pay for the rest of their journey to Germany, where they plan to  open a cafe and re-start their lives.

That’s the premise of To A Land Unknown, and it’s brilliantly played out in  this taut, sad buddy-movie crime caper.

Some audiences will dislike it because it does not paint the asylum-seekers as unblemished heroes, though neither are they outright baddies. Chatila (with a wife and child waiting in a Lebanese camp) and his weaker, heroin addict cousin Reda, for whom Chatila takes responsibility, are trying to do their best in the worst of circumstances.

To get money to pay for their travel documents, they snatch bags from Greeks in the park, steal shoes and sell them on the street, sell sex for cash.. 

But it’s not enough, and when Chatila comes up with a plan that starts to unravel (”We’re getting out, no matter what”), their actions become darker and crueller.

They are decent men caught up in a situation designed to stress-test their morality and scruples. The audience sees that the plan is crazy, that one lie leads to another, that their temporising leads to still more egregious behaviour. There’s as much tension in seeing the duo forced into a downward spiral as in watching plans going awry.

It’s a terrific watch, superbly acted by the two leading men, and a triumph for Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel, a graduate of the UK National Film & TV School. 

In an interview with Variety, Fleifel has said the film is a tribute to his filmmaking heroes and that it offers a “new angle” to refugee stories in cinema. 

He also said he hopes that it will make people connect with Palestinians on a human level: “All they want is to have a better life and, like us, they have dreams and fears and hopes. But they’re stuck.”