Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Stay informed with free updatesSimply sign up to the Film myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.Mahdi Fleifel’s drama To a Land Unknown begins with a quotation from Edward Said, who suggested that it is the fate of Palestinians “not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away”. Just to give a sense of how statelessness is somehow encoded into the film’s very DNA, this is a British-French-German-Greek-Danish-Dutch-Qatari-Saudi-Palestinian co-production. Writer-director Fleifel, himself Danish-Palestinian, has created something that starts as a realist drama with a documentary flavour, but gradually turns into a harsh, nerve-racking crime thriller. A story about migrants trapped in limbo between their point of departure and their dreamt-of, perhaps unreachable destination, To a Land Unknown is about what happens to the soul — and the moral compass — when people exist long-term in a condition of seemingly hopeless suspension.The film’s two heroes — increasingly, anti-heroes — are two young Palestinian men languishing in Athens. Cousins Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) dream of reaching Germany and starting new lives — and, in Chatila’s case, being reunited with his wife and young son, who are in a refugee camp in Lebanon. In order to travel, they need fake passports, which put them in debt to a local trafficker. Living in a rundown halfway house with other exiled males, their hope is being eroded by ennui and despair; the duo survive on petty crime, while Reda, who has a drug habit, does some sex work on the side. With their lives balanced on the edge of a volcano, every seemingly positive move they make has a distinct last-ditch quality.The pair’s protective instincts — then their eye for a scam — are aroused by an encounter with Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), a stranded 13-year-old boy from Gaza who wants to join his aunt in Italy. Chatila hatches a scheme to transform the fates of all three, enlisting Tatiana (played with wonderful abrasiveness by Greek cinema mainstay Angeliki Papoulia), a woman with whom he has become romantically involved. But the next stage of the plan involves the cousins becoming the exploiters of men who are very like them, but less experienced and more credulous — leading to a final act that makes the blood, and the sweat, run cold.To a Land Unknown is bitterly unsentimental, but it has a dark streak of humour, and real tenderness too — above all in its depiction of the relationship between Chatila and Reda, which is both emotionally and economically co-dependent, and which carries distinct echoes of Midnight Cowboy. The two male leads’ performances crackle with nervous tension, as do their physical beings, two rangy frames that seem to have been pared to the bone dragging across the rocky landscape seen at the film’s start.★★★★☆In UK cinemas from February 15
