“In a way, it’s sort of the fate of the Palestinians not to end up where they started,” the Palestinian writer Edward Said once wrote, “but somewhere unexpected and faraway.” Opening Mahdi Fleifel’s more-than-a-decade-in-the-making second feature, To a Land Unknown, the quote is embodied by principal characters Reda and Chatila (Mahmood Bakri and Aram Sabbah), cousins who’ve landed in Greece after a long time spent in a refugee camp in Lebanon. The pair sees the latter and the Athens neighborhood where they’re currently living as something like pit stops. Life in Lebanon, as one of the men describes it, was too uneasily similar to their native Gaza, and in Greece they’re acutely made to feel like unwanted outsiders. Their sights are set on Germany, where they hope to relocate to a majority-Arab neighborhood so that Chatila and his chef wife, who’s still in Lebanon with their young son, can open a café, with Reda responsible for front-of-house tasks.

Reda and Chatila’s existence in Athens, where they live in a derelict building with some other refugees, consists of not much more than trying to save money to get themselves and their family members to their final destination. With neither able to get steady jobs, they resort to other, less-reliable means they don’t feel good about: distracting old women at parks so that they can snatch their purses, shoplifting vogue sneakers so that they can resell them, sporadically selling sex. A little into To a Land Unknown comes what seems to be an obvious opportunity to reap the financial benefits of small-time smuggling: the arrival of a 13-year-old orphan from Gaza, Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), who’s trying to get to his cautiously willing-to-pay aunt in Rome.

In this incessantly suspenseful movie (even in moments of respite, Fleifel makes you brace for a setback), you never feel confident about something straightforwardly working out, not least because Reda is battling an on-and-off addiction to heroin that will, early in the movie, lead him to waste much of his and Chatila’s accrued finances to score. To a Land Unknown is a painful, nerve-racking film; much of that feeling comes from how quickly and deeply we come to care about Reda and Chatila, men superbly played by Bakri and Sabbah who’ve been dealt unthinkable, life-upending circumstances. They’re trying to arrive at a safe approximation of home but are increasingly forced to go to lengths they otherwise wouldn’t resort to if the stakes weren’t so high.

Mahmood Bakri and Aram Sabbah in To a Land Unknown. All imagery courtesy of the Cannes Film Festival.

To a Land Unknown’s utmost testament to that comes during its charged final act, which, though excruciating to watch, preserves the film’s core of unconditional empathy, underscoring how criminal behavior is rarely not born of despair. (That compassionate vantage is another way To a Land Unknown is reminiscent of movies like Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon or John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy, New Hollywood films to which it has been frequently compared.) 

“Human beings are not always perfect,” Fleifel, who’s spent the last several years making short films about Palestinian life, said in a recent interview with The New Arab. “We’re not always pure.” Palestine is only mentioned a few times in the autobiographically informed To a Land Unknown — its most protracted direct reference comes from visual glimpses of the country’s shape outlined on the left side of Reda’s unclothed torso — and its ongoing destruction by Israel is never mentioned at all. But the lack of explicitness doesn’t mean one doesn’t feel the existential byproduct of the latter throughout the movie, whose November 2023 production start date has obviously been shadowed by a mounting genocide of a generationally subjugated and dehumanized group.

Fleifel’s stress on his characters’ humanity — and the moral complications they continuously have to confront — is vital as Palestinians are, in the wider world, consistently reduced to statistics. Sympathy is often beholden in bad faith to nonsensical perfect-victim standards if not trounced entirely in favor of their oppressors’ aims. “One guy, the other day after [a] screening, came out and told me I should consider showing Palestinians in a better light,” Fleifel recounted in a recent interview with Asian Movie Pulse. “I asked him what light he wanted. I am just trying to be honest; it is not that I make a deliberate choice to air my dirty underwear in front of everyone in public. These are the circumstances, and I wanted to be honest to their experience.”