Young Critics review: To a Land Unknown

Review by Marina Zigneli

It took Mahdi Fleifel ten years and several short films along the way to complete his feature film, To a Land Unknown. Over the course of this decade, much has changed—particularly since the Israeli forces initiated a genocidal attack on Gaza a year ago. A refugee thriller for some, a social-realist drama for others, To a Land Unknown tracks the Palestinian experience in the Greek capital of Athens, a city that has been on the receiving end of the refugee influx throughout this past decade and even longer before that.

Having fled the camps in Lebanon, two cousins from Palestine, Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah), find themselves stranded in Athens, in their quest to reach Germany. Hoping to save enough money for the passports that will allow them to leave Greece, they engage in everyday petty thefts. Consumed by this struggle and their life at an over-crowded squat in central Athens, each carries his own burden: Chatila has left behind his wife and son in the camp, promising them a better future, while Reda, before their “grand escape” to Germany, finds temporary escape in his drug addiction.

Fleifel’s greatest achievement in this endeavor, perhaps informed by his long-time experience with documentaries on similar subjects, is that the refugee experience never feels forced or sensationalized. With an elaborate, yet unlawful plan to flee Greece as soon as possible, Chatila becomes the driving force behind their move to Germany, fully aware that Reda’s vulnerability could jeopardize everything. Indeed, even when Reda’s addiction threatens to derail everything for both of them, Fleifel avoids overdramatizing their plight. Instead, he observes what can happen to people in exile when the weight of inescapability begins to take hold. Athens then becomes a crater that swallows both of them, a kind of place that was initially supposed to be a temporary layover on their path to a better life, but whose bottom keeps sinking further with each passing day, dragging them down with it.

At the same time, To a Land Unknown offers one of the rare glimpses of the Greek capital in its most sincere form on the big screen: a run-down city covered in graffiti, with deserted old buildings and residents who often carry little more than five euros in their pockets. Thodoris Mihopoulos’ camera captures the city’s contradictory identity, focusing on walls plastered with anti-fascist and anti-racist posters as Chatila and Reda race down the streets. The film’s imagery is closely attuned to the city's soundscape, with police sirens wailing in the background, and Greek voices shouting behind closed doors. No longer the romanticized backdrop often used in films to attract tourists, Athens becomes a kind of limbo for those stranded there against their will, a city that reflects their own sense of entrapment. It is Malik (Mohammed Alsurafa), a young boy from Gaza whom Chatila and Reda meet one day, who points out that Acropolis is visible from nearly everywhere in the city, except refugees do not really have the time to look up; they’re too busy surviving.

This feeling is further heightened in scenes where the two characters watch the city from a hill, only to find themselves back in the narrow streets of Kypseli or confined within the walls of a dilapidated apartment moments later. Even more particularly, the neighborhood of Kypseli, one that has been the locus of migrant and refugee inflow since the interwar period in Greece, is now honestly portrayed as the hive (the literal translation of ‘Kypseli’ in English) of Athenian multiculturalism that it really is. At a time when efforts to de-ghettoize Kypseli in the minds of the Athenian public remain one of the city’s main challenges, Fleifel’s decision to situate his film here sheds light on the tension between marginalization and resilience.

“How do you keep being human, when you’re no longer treated as one?” is the central question the film poses. Yet, it masterfully avoids pitying its characters. Love and care are never questioned, as the two leads keep hold of their agency until the very end. Bakri and Sabbah do excellent work in creating a bond so strong that it manages to oscillate between Chatila’s decisiveness and Reda’s vulnerability—a perfect balance that also reflects Bakri’s professional acting background and Sabbah’s natural presence as a non-actor. What truly stands out is how they embody the shared experience of being away from what they once called “home”, alongside the other refugees in the film. These people are not just sitting passively, waiting for something to change; their bodies are filled with tension, always ready to run and evade the police, all while grappling with a deep, mournful longing—not for home as it was, but for the idea of home. In a telling scene halfway through the film, which encapsulates the refugee experience in a few lines, Abu Love (Mouataz Alshaltouh), Reda’s dealer and a man who likes to identify as “a poem, not a poet”, recites Mahmoud Darwish’s verses, that further validate this omnipresent sense of exile, not only for Palestinians, but for all displaced people: “The mask has fallen off. You have no brothers, my brother. You have no castles, no water, no medicine, no sky, no blood, no sail.”

By the end of To a Land Unknown, as the precarity of their next steps grows bigger, words end up being the only means left for the characters to believe that things may actually change. Chatila always makes sure to remind us that he will open a café. His wife, Nabila, will cook there. He will have a big ashtray on his desk. Together with Reda, they will find a nice, old place and turn it into their own. For Chatila, reality can only be articulated in the future tense, as past and present have already failed him.