Dispatches from VIFF #2
To a Land Unknown
Director: Mahdi Fleifel
105 mins
To a Land Unknown is a slow spiral into oblivion. Following cousins Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah), illegal Palestinian refugees living in squalor in a destitute Athens, we are thrown into a harrowing life of survival. Our protagonists scam, scheme, and steal in order to make it just one more day, with the slowly fading dream of getting to Germany being their only beacon of hope. Director Mahdi Fleifel is unforgiving in his portrayal of life in desperation, for while there are the glimmers of the good that Chatila and Reda once held, the life they lead does not allow room for the kind-hearted.
This is a film that lives on the shoulders of our leads, with both Bakri and Sabbah giving stellar performances. Chatila presents himself as the realistic of the two, the one with the grit necessary to make it to Germany. Reda, on the other hand, is a gentler soul, one who can’t bear the squalor and pain that they have found in Athens. Turning to heroin as a way to cope with his life, he is constantly putting Chatila’s vision of a life in Germany in jeopardy. While the two may argue and fight, and while Reda may be unreliable while in the grip of addiction, Chatila knows he would not survive without his cousin. They are bonded for life, a bond deeper than blood, a bond that signifies they will do anything for each other. And over the course of the film they prove this bond time and time again.
The film plays in parallel to the novella Of Mice and Men. Much like the mythical farm that Lenny and George speak of there, Germany is a paradise all but unreachable for our ill-fated refugees. They speak of opening a cafe, being a place of gathering and community, of feeding people food that will be life changing. Germany is a place of an imagined future, a place that will take the lives they were robbed of in Palestine and place them in a new, better place. Chatila, in a moment of hope, mentions how their imagined cafe will be a replica of the one his deceased father used to run. Our characters are constantly running, running from a place that was stolen from them and chasing a place that will never be. Stuck between what will never be again and what will never come to be, all they have is the dying hopes of the next day.
The film uses language and poetry as a devastating reminder of the life left behind. Poetry as an art and an act of protest has been used by the Palestinian people for years in their struggle for reclamation, while here those poems are used to hold them down and force them to confront the people they have turned into. The opening poem states how the Palestinian people are destined to search for a place but never to find it. A character who is but a snake in the grass speaks in poetry, and calls himself a poem when he is a poisoner. Language itself is a tool of oppression, as Chatila is the only character able to communicate with everyone. He speaks Arabic, some Greek, and some English, and with these different languages he is constantly pulled between the worlds of the past, future, and present.
The film is ultimately about the sins we take on in searching for betterment. The price of a “good life”, the price of a future, is one that comes at a cost not many are willing to pay. And what of this good life? If one can set up a cafe, a community, can kiss his wife goodnight and hold his son? Will this bring him all the joy he desires, or will it simply be replaced by something more, and more, and more? To a Land Unknown speaks of a future we dare not reach for, for once it is reached we may have already doomed ourselves for having such a desire.