FILM OF THE WEEK: To A Land Unknown - by Roe McDermott

“In a way, it’s a sort of fate of Palestinians not to end up where they started but somewhere unexpected and far away.”

So opens Mahdi Fleifel’s To A Land Unknown, quoting the late Palestinian-American activist Edward Said. But Fleifel’s film is not just a film about exile - it is a film made in exile, by a filmmaker whose own history is deeply entangled with displacement. Born to Palestinian parents Mahdi Fleifel was raised between the refugee camp Ein el-Helweh in Lebanon and Dubai before moving to Europe, Fleifel has spent his career documenting the struggles of Palestinian refugees.

His 2012 documentary A World Not Ours chronicled life in a Lebanese refugee camp, capturing both the resilience and despair of those trapped in a cycle of statelessness. It was during the making of that film that Fleifel met a young refugee who would later escape to Greece, an encounter that opened his eyes to a new chapter of the Palestinian diaspora.

Inspired by Ghassan Kanafani’s Men in the Sun, a seminal novel about Palestinian refugees attempting to cross the desert, Fleifel envisioned To A Land Unknown as a contemporary cinematic parallel, with Athens as the new limbo for those seeking a better future. But unlike the ancient city’s grand mythological past, Fleifel’s Athens is no cradle of civilisation - it is an urban desert where survival demands moral compromise, and hope is an ever-fading horizon.

The film focuses on two Palestinian cousins, Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) who struggle to survive in a version of Athens far removed from the glossy tourist brochures. Their goal is to escape the limbo they find themselves in, crossing into mainland Europe to start fresh.

Chatila dreams of opening a café with his wife, who remains in a refugee camp in Lebanon, while Reda’s drug addiction repeatedly threatens their already fragile plans. Chatila is driven and proactive, resorting to petty theft to try buy fake passports and tickets to Germany, driven by the hope of being reunited with his family.

Reda’ struggles are more upsetting, as his trauma and pain lures him to drug use and selling sex, as the impacts of trauma and the need to survive become a vicious cycle of pain. Reda, naïve and childlike, is the more vulnerable of the two frequently exploited and always on the brink of breaking.

He repeatedly asks Chatila to tell him about the dream of the café, like a child, or Lenny in Of Mice and Men. He also strikes up a friendship with Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), a 13-year-old Palestinian kid who thought he was being sent to Italy to meet his aunt, but was unceremoniously dropped in Athens by the smugglers who promised to transport him.

As the story’s George, Mahmood Bakri is fantastic, showing Chatila’s determination, street smarts, resilience and ability to but also his parental form of care and love that he extends to Reda. Despite arguments and frustrations, the two men cling to each other, the only reminders of home that they currently have. Whether they can cling onto their sense of humanity is another question.

Thematically, Fleifel is playing with rich material, including exile, survival and the moral compromises that come with desperation. Fleifel has no interest in patronising his characters or showing them as unimpeachable innocents, and instead pushes audiences to reckon with Chatila and Reda’s increasingly desperate actions, challenging the notion that only the blameless deserve compassion.

By depicting survival as a path fraught with morally ambiguous choices, it forces viewers to consider whether innocence should be a condition for receiving help, and when heinous, systemic atrocities have been committed against a people, what we’ll accept of them as they fight for survival.

This ethical complexity is reinforced by the film’s striking visual style. Fleifel, working with cinematographer Thodoros Mihopoulos, keeps the camera intimately close to the characters, capturing subtle expressions and unspoken tensions that deepen the emotional weight of their journey. The unromanticised depiction of Athens’ overcrowded, decaying refugee quarters further amplifies the film’s harsh realism, immersing the audience in an environment of perpetual struggle.

Malik says he sees the Acropolis every day, but the audience does not and Malik couldn’t care less – why would you worship history of humanity when it can’t promise you a future? Even as the narrative shifts from a close human drama to a dark thriller, Mihopoulos’ camerawork maintains a grounded, deeply human perspective, ensuring that the film’s raw emotion and social critique remain at its core. When you’re stuck in purgatory, the film asks, why not commit some more sins if it’s your only chance of escape?

• Out now. Watch the trailer below: