Director Mahdi Fleifel’s tale of displacement, desperation and the lengths one man will go to survive makes for suspenseful, melancholic viewing
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.”
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Source link : https://www.theguardian.com/film/2025/feb/12/to-a-land-unknown-review-mahdi-fleifel
Author : Peter Bradshaw
Publish date : 2025-02-12 11:00:23
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