To a Land Unknown
**Seen at the 2025 Atlanta Film Festival
At one point in “To a Land Unknown,” Reda (Aram Sabbah) tells his cousin, Chatila (Mahmoud Bakri), that “we’re bad people.” Just taking a surface level look at the characters as their story plays out in director Mahdi Fleifel’s drama, it is true that they have done awful things to people over the course of the film. But difficult times can demand unprecedented actions, and- also on a surface level- one can see the reasons for their choices, even if they are terrible choices on a moral level. For them, the endgame is to get to a place of peace and freedom, something they haven’t really known in their lives.
Chatila and Reda are Palestinians living in Greece. Displaced from their homeland- and separated from their families (his mother for Reda, his wife and son for Chatila), they have turned to a live of crime to get by, hoping to get blackmarket passports so they can fly to Germany. Their crimes are petty ones, but as they get more anxious to get out of Greece, a meeting with a young Palestinian boy, Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), whom is separated from his aunt, causes them to escalate their actions into something more desperate, and more dangerous.
Main characters like Chatila and Reda walk a very thin tightrope. They should be immediately engaging so that we will follow them through the story- and thanks to the empathetic performances by Bakri and Sabbah, we do- but they also have to make choices that are monstrous along to way. Can we still engage with those characters as people after they cross certain lines? This is where the screenplay by Fyzal Boulifa, Fleifel and Jason McColgan comes into play. These characters can barely work through their own situations- how are they going to help Malik? Chatila and Reda still talk about the dreams they have for when they make it to Germany, but “To a Land Unknown” makes fascinating points- unspoken ones- that these are not the same people they were when they left Gaza, and their choices reflect that. They are doing what they need to do for their own survival, no matter how “noble” their actions may seem. We can judge them, or we can challenge our own ideas of what we might do in a similar situation, and send our empathy to them anyway. That is the choice cinema can ask us to make- whether we take it is up to us. I took it, and was saddened for these character by the end when that dream was out of reach.
