Films tackling the experience of refugees in Europe have mostly been authored by filmmakers from the sort of European countries that attract refugees. In attempting to empathise with people whose experiences they could never really comprehend, such filmmakers tend to deliver well intentioned yet patronising portrayals of refugees as angelic figures victimised by various cruel and exploitative systems.
To a Land Unknown is written and directed by a former Palestinian refugee, Mahdi Fleifel (co-writing with Fyzal Boulifa and Jason McColgan), who spent a portion of his childhood in the infamous Ein el-Helweh refugee camp in Lebanon. The Palestinian refugee protagonists of Fleifel's film are far from saintly, and the filmmaker almost goes out of his way to make it difficult for us to sympathise with them as their actions become increasingly cold-hearted and ruthless. It's difficult to imagine a white western filmmaker adopting such an approach to this topic, but Fleifel isn't interested in whether we like his characters; he's more concerned with us understanding what motivates their actions.
"We're bad people." So insists Reda (Aram Sabbah) when his domineering cousin Chatila (Mahmoud Bakri) embroils him in one of the many unscrupulous schemes hatched throughout the film's episodic narrative. Based on their actions, it's hard to disagree with Reda's mournful assertion. The movie opens with the pair stealing a purse from an elderly lady, and by the final act they're torturing fellow refugees in a desperate attempt to extract vital information.
Having fled Palestine, Reda and Chatila are stuck in the limbo of Athens, trying to scrounge enough money to purchase fake passports. Chatila has a pipedream of opening a café in Germany, while the heroin-addicted Reda is happy to go along with whatever his more together cousin thinks is best. When Reda blows their savings on a fix, he's encouraged by Chatila to turn tricks in a local park, but the funds for the passports seem a long way off. Then fate drops a young Palestinian boy, Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), in their laps. Malik wants to join his aunt in Italy, so Chatila comes up with the idea of acquiring the boy a fake ID and having a local alcoholic woman, Tatiana (Yorgos Lathimos regular Angeliki Papoulia), pose as his mother to accompany him to Italy. Upon arrival, Malik's aunt will wire them €4000 and their problems will be over.
Of course, Chatila's hare-brained scheme doesn't go to plan, leading him to take more ruthless action and driving a wedge in his relationship with his cousin, who grows increasingly uncomfortable with their new lives as criminals.
To a Land Unknown may be telling a story that you'll find playing out on the streets of any major European city today, but it takes its narrative cues from gritty New York dramas of the late 1960s and early '70s like The Panic in Needle Park and Midnight Cowboy, the latter explicitly so. But Chatila and Reda aren't simply like-for-like substitutes for Dustin Hoffman's Ratso Rizzo and Jon Voight's Jo Buck. Reda might be a stunted junkie like Rizzo, but he's also the one who sells his body like Buck. Chatila manipulates Reda in the same manner as Ratso exploits Buck, but he's the sober one. These two men are purposely complicated, and it's Fleifel's resistance to slotting them into easily defined archetypes that makes them so compelling. It's difficult to root for Chatila and Reda, because we're not entirely sure of their goals, and their success seems increasingly dependant on the exploitation of others. We want Reda to free himself from Chatila's control, but we suspect he wouldn't last long without him. Their dynamic is similar to that of the Dublin junkies of Lenny Abrahamson's Adam & Paul, though there's much less black comedy here.
The 16mm photography of Thodoros Mihopoulos simultaneously creates a vibrant immediacy while giving To a Land Unknown a timeless quality. Aside from the intrusion of cellphones, the film looks as though it could have been shot at any time in the last 50 years, and Chatila and Reda's costumes create the impression that they've been pulling these schemes since the '80s. The historic background of Athens - where as Malik notes, the Acropolis can be seen from every street corner - adds to this sense that Chatila and Reda are trapped out of time in a limbo. As refugees their personal problems may be immediate, but as Palestinians their wider struggle is one that spans centuries, with no resolution in sight.
Directed by: Mahdi Fleifel
Starring: Mahmood Bakri, Aram Sabbagh, Angeliki Papoulia, Mohammad Alsurafa
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