To a Land Unknown review: Palestinian crime film lays bare the desperate plight of refugees

One of the standouts from this year's Cannes is screening at both the Marrakesh and Red Sea film festivals

From left, Mohammad Alsurafa, Aram Sabbah and Mahmood Bakri star in To a Land Unknown. Photo: Film Clinic

There's no room for morality in desperation. That is the view of Chatila (Mahmood Bakri), the lead character of To a Land Unknown, but it's not one shared by his best friend Reda (Aram Sabbah).

When we meet Chatila and Reda, they're on the streets of Athens, casing a public park for an easy mark. The two best friends are undocumented refugees from Palestine, saving up whatever money they can hustle together to ensure safe passage for them and their families to Germany.

Most of their means of obtaining money are illegal. In the opening scene, Reda falls off his skateboard in front of a kind old woman. When she tries to help him, Chatila steals her purse. Moments later, he curses that she only had five euros. Reda finds her medicine, asking if he can bring it back to her. Chatila won't allow it.

The film centres on two best friends, undocumented refugees from Palestine, saving up whatever money they can hustle together so they and their families can emigrate to Germany. Photo: Film Clinic

There is no overt political message in Danish-Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel's searing, excellent fiction debut. There is no mention of the current devastation even though the movie was shot after the Israel-Gaza war had begun. But tragedy looms large here. Early on, they meet a young boy alone on the street, his family dead. "Where are you from?" they ask. "Gaza," the boy responds. Chatila dismisses him, later agreeing to help him when he becomes useful.

It's rare to see a Palestinian film that so tests the limits of the audience's empathy. Often, when we meet Palestinians on screen, those suffering either within Palestine or in exile from their homeland, they confront their circumstances righteously. But injustice is still injustice regardless of how it affects its victims, and what dark paths it leads them down.

Chatila and Reda did not choose this darkness, and for them, the stakes are high. They were raised as brothers by Chatila's father, and dream of one day creating a life in Germany like the one their father had in Palestine – hoping to one day own a cafe and live in humble prosperity. Chatila has a wife and a two-year-old child at a refugee camp in Lebanon, and he promises to get them out – though his wife has begun to lose faith that he will.

There is no overt political message in To a Land Unknown, but tragedy looms large. Photo: Film Clinic

They lie, cheat and steal to survive and raise enough money for forged passports, through a man they hope they can trust. Their relationship has echoes of John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, with Chatila the brilliant schemer (powerfully rendered with shapeshifting nuance by Bakri, who firmly establishes himself here as one of the Arab world's most promising young stars) and Reda his innocent-hearted but mentally limited partner – hobbled by a drug problem that makes their journey even harder.

Early on, there's a reference to one of the greatest books of 20th-century Palestinian literature – Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani. In that book, itself an indictment of the passivity of some Palestinian political figures in the wake of the 1948 Nakba, three exiled Palestinian men embark on their own journey towards personal peace, hiding in the back of an oil truck across Iraq to get over the Kuwaiti border. Its ending is one of the most powerful in modern fiction, as the driver opens the tank after a successful arrival, only to find each man has died inside.

"We're not going to suffocate in the back of a truck," Chatila tells Reda. "We're going to take a plane."

Sabbah and Bakri deliver a sterling performance. Photo: Film Clinic

There is no malice in their actions. When Chatila hatches schemes, when he adjusts his demeanour to manipulate, it is clear he's thinking only of his loved ones, even as their choices get more and more extreme and their failure becomes more and more inevitable. And while it becomes harder and harder to like them, you never stop feeling for them. They don't deserve this. No one does.

To a Land Unknown is a gripping neorealist neo-noir that is among the best international crime films produced in years, well-executed on all levels. Hopefully, once its festival tour is over, it will be watched by audiences all over, as it deserves to be seen not because it's "important" or "necessary" amid a historic injustice, but because it's great cinema in the classical vein.

To a Land Unknown screens at Marrakesh International Film Festival and Red Sea International Film Festival on Saturday