To a Land Unknown: intense thriller explores the lives of Palestinian exiles

Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown opens with a quotation from Edward Said: “In a way, it’s sort of the fate of Palestinians, not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away.” Said’s words set a foreboding, fatalistic tone. The film is all about home, safety and humanity, and yet it is their absence that is most felt in this uncomfortable thriller. Fleifel’s characters carry those lofty themes in their bodies, infusing the film with a visceral ache and a powerful undercurrent of yearning.

The story expands on themes from Fleifel’s previous films, notably distance and longing. Set far away from his Palestinian homeland and the camps of Lebanon, on the shores of democracy and ancient gods in Athens, this film is about displacement and broken hearts. Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (brilliant newcomer Aram Sabbah) are cousins who observe the city’s park life, looking for easy targets for their petty scams. Chatila is the brains, and Reda, a more sensitive soul, bound to him by love and loyalty, just goes along with it all.

The old adage that blood’s thicker than water holds tight, but Fleifel pushes and picks at the notion like a scab, questioning how any inherently unequal power dynamic – between nations or clans – could ever have an ending other than catastrophe. The rhythm of daily life in Athens thrums slowly, like a stifling heatwave: the days are long, and the nights longer. Petty crime by day is punctuated with drink, drugs and poetry by night. Reda is easily seduced by these indulgences, but Chatila abstains; purgatory has no time for poetry.

Though Chatila acts like an older brother, he is also controlling. Who, the film asks earnestly, has the right to judge the damned? Is a fake passport a more noble form of escape than heroin? Fleifel steers clear of answering but, with a deft touch, brings the interplay between these macro and microcosms of human betrayal – systemic and one-to-one – into clear view.

In someone else’s hands, the film might have slipped into didactics, but Fleifel is steadfast: there are no good choices in this world. Inspired by real-life stories he has heard throughout his own displaced life in Dubai and then Denmark, but also heavily influenced by the 1970s Hollywood films he grew up watching, To a Land Unknown is a rare example of slick stylistics seamlessly combined with verisimilitude.

The stakes ramp up considerably with the arrival of a teenage Palestinian boy, whose innocence acts as a trigger to set the thriller plot in motion. The boy needs help crossing to Italy. On the one hand, there is an opportunity to act with humanity; on the other, they could make money here – and so, Chatila cooks up a people-smuggling scheme that is doomed to play out like a Greek tragedy. Preying on an easy target, in the form of a lonely local (Angeliki Papoulia) who only needs to act as the boy’s mother to get him across the border, Chatila turns on the charm to deceive.

Fleifel has mentioned Martin Scorsese, Sidney Lumet and Brian De Palma as influences; each of them can be felt in the violence and betrayals of the film. There’s also a nod to John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), and the unfortunate Chatila and Reda feel at times like a recasting of Al Pacino and John Cazale’s Sonny and Sal from Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon (1975). Thodoris Mihopoulos’s cinematography conveys the film’s ethical push and pull through dim interior lighting and extreme close-ups, contrasted with stark daylight and wider shots that depict Athens as a sort of urban wasteland.

The mix of veteran actors and newcomers lends the film its gritty balance – Sabbah’s hangdog expression conveys a gentle naivety that proves heart-breaking against his character’s living hell, while the Jordanian actor Monzer Rayahneh brings heft to a small role as human trafficker Marwan, the weight of his experience looming large over the narrative. Palestine is barely mentioned in the film, though it is always present – through the iconic shape of the land tattooed on Reda’s body, through Mahmoud Darwish’s poem ‘Praise for the High Shadow’, espoused by drug dealer Abu Love (Mouataz Alshaltouh). Such clashes of high art and low life co-exist in the placelessness of a land unknown.

► To a Land Unknown is in UK cinemas from 14 February.