To a Land Unknown (Mahdi Fleifel, 2024).
When Mahdi Fleifel’s To a Land Unknown (2024) premiered in the Directors’ Fortnight, its rapturous reception was a rare moment of solidarity in a festival environment that otherwise sought apoliticality. The only Palestinian film to be selected across all sections of the Cannes Film Festival, To a Land Unknown offered a vital link to an ongoing, real-world crisis, breaking the bubble of the festival landscape. Palestinian flags soared inside the theater at the film’s debut screening, while down the Croisette at the Théâtre Debussy, several journalists were asked to remove pin badges expressing their political commitments, some to the Palestinian cause and others to the labor activity of the festival workers. What use can a festival have in a time of genocide if it neither acknowledges political struggle nor centers stories by and about oppressed peoples?
The story of two refugees, Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah), Fleifel’s film explores their struggle to survive in Athens as they attempt to make their way west, further into Europe. Chatila is the level-headed, firm counterpart to Reda, whose battles with drug addiction challenge their pursuit of freedom. Their lives intersect with an array of dynamic sidekicks, the drug-dealer-turned-poet Abu Love (Mouataz Alshaltouh), or the young boy whom they ultimately traffic out of Athens with the help of a Greek woman, played by arthouse film favorite Angeliki Papoulia. There are echoes of John Schlesinger’s Midnight Cowboy (1969), or John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, a key source of inspiration for Fleifel. But there’s also something entirely singular in this tender film, where the warm humor of a buddy movie meets a social-realist portrait of displaced people.
Fleifel’s direction is skillful, balancing these shifting tones and genre flourishes so that even when, in the third act, a thriller turn becomes apparent, the film remains cohesive and emotionally resonant. It navigates the deep complexity of its characters’ situation with care and frankness; Chatila and Reda must use people for their own gain, whether it’s stealing a woman’s purse or plotting with smugglers to make money for their own escape. Yet how can someone be altruistic in a world that has stripped away all of their agency, all of their ability to do anything but survive? “It was in another country that I earned my harsh subsistence, a place that had everything and nothing,” wrote the Palestinian author and activist Ghassan Kanafani, a guiding spirit for Fleifel, in his novella All That’s Left to You, “that same country which gave you everything in order to deny you it.”
Toward the end of the festival, I spoke with Fleifel, who is Palestinian Danish, about making a film for exiles, the devastation of shame, and the work, both his own and by others, that so deeply influenced this project.
To a Land Unknown (Mahdi Fleifel, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: Can you talk a little about the origins of this project and the production process?
MAHDI FLEIFEL: I've been trying to make this film for ten years, and when I finally got the chance to do it, it was almost like a starving dog that gets a bone thrown and will not let it go. Preproduction was a nightmare because of the logistics of making a Palestinian film in Greece and bringing in actors. We had to coordinate all these exiles—Who has what passport? and Does this person have a visa? The young boy, Abu Love, and Reda were not played by the initial actors we cast because the three of them were stuck in Jordan and couldn't get out. We couldn't get visas to come to Athens until like a week before, so I had to recast them. So we found Aram [Sabbah] in Ramallah. He's a famous skater, and luckily, he has a Colombian passport. The boy we found in Greece, thanks to the casting director, at the last minute. I think there were angels working along the way to help us make this work. But once we started production, it was actually as smooth as it could be. I shot it all in the Kypseli neighborhood of Athens, which is the first place I ever visited in Greece back in 2011. I was following my friend at the time, who was featured in A World Not Ours [2012]. The way I work is almost like making sourdough, taking from the last project to feed the next. When I came to Athens with him, a new world opened up, and that’s when the idea for this film really started. I tried so hard to convince film funds in Europe to make the film, but it was so frustrating. I wasted about four or five years developing the idea in Denmark—producers in Denmark will not really move the train unless all the tracks and everything has been secured financially, and so on. It's just absurd. If we'd had this mindset, we would never have made it. Then, we started filming a month after October 7th…
NOTEBOOK: I’m sure that massively impacted so much of the making of this film.
FLEIFEL: It impacted everyone, to the point where I started to notice that the actors were turning up for rehearsals and they had not slept because they were staying up until 3 a.m. watching the news. I had to say to them, look, I know it's difficult, we're all worried about what's happening, but the best thing we can do right now is to focus on this. And I think it brought out a sense of camaraderie and solidarity on set. There was such a strong bond of love between the Greeks, Palestinians, and everyone. I would really say this is a film made in exile about exiles and for exiles, whoever doesn't feel like they belong in this world of ours today.
To a Land Unknown (Mahdi Fleifel, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: How did you conceptualize the film and your approach to these characters? I think the film, importantly, finds a way to be incredibly human without sensationalizing the drama.
FLEIFEL: Cinema is an art form that borrows from different art forms. You know, it’s 20 percent music, 20 percent theater, 20 percent literature, and so on and so forth. I always try to use literary references. So from the get-go, I thought that this is Men in the Sun by Ghassan Kanafani. He wrote about these guys, three men who leave the camps in Lebanon to go and work in the Gulf, which was kind of the promised land, and they ended up being stuck in the desert between Iraq and Kuwait at the mercy of the smugglers. So when I arrived in Athens, I was like, Oh my God, the story hasn't changed, it’s just different. Now the desert is Athens, this urban desert that they're stuck in, this purgatory. So that was the kind of spiritual inspiration—I always felt like I had Ghassan Kanafani with me who also, by the way, wrote A World Not Ours. I just borrowed the title [for my documentary].
And then, of course, Edward Said, who helped me understand, and I'm not sure I fully understand to this day but at least gave me some window into, what it means to be an exile. Throughout my life, I’ve asked, What am I? Am I an Arab, European, Palestinian, Danish? I've never really felt like I belong. And there comes Said, who takes my hand and says, Actually, you're out of place.You're an exile. It's okay to embrace all of these. You are an Arab and a European and a Palestinian and a Dane, and it's okay. At one point, due to some financial restrictions, I thought I could have two characters instead of three. Rather than an ensemble piece, I could make it into more of a buddy movie. I love that genre. In film school, I was always making the same film over and over again: usually two neurotic Arabs in London, total opposites, one fat, the other skinny, very Laurel and Hardy. Being a child of the ’80s, as well, there were all of these movies: 48 Hrs. [1982], Lethal Weapon [1987], Midnight Run [1988].
Then there were two very influential novels that I read as a kid, Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies. They kind of started to poke their heads up, too. You know, it's George and Lennie, the café is the farm, they want to live their lives and just carve out a piece of land for themselves. Actually in the script, Reda was exactly like Lennie, this huge guy, and we had cast someone like that, but when this actor learned about the park scene [in which Reda solicits sex] he backed out. He was like, “If people see me in a scene like this back in Jordan, I'm gonna be officially out.” The casting was really not easy. Especially because I wasn’t going to compromise on it. Palestinians are played by Palestinians, Jordanians by Jordanians, Syrians by Syrians—it had to make sense to my ear.
But then this is where I love as a director to be surprised. That's what documentary actually opened up for me, that you have to be open and what you actually get will go beyond your imagination. So I thought what if Reda was someone else, or looked different physically, and as soon as Aram came into the picture, it just made sense. Knowing that he's a skater, I was like, let’s use it in the story. When they perform their trick [to steal a woman’s purse], Reda was originally going to sing like an idiot. But of course with the skateboard fall, it was a no-brainer—it was visually more interesting and silent . . .
NOTEBOOK: Almost slightly slapstick, back to your Laurel and Hardy reference.
FLEIFEL: Exactly!
NOTEBOOK: To come back to that park scene, something that really struck me was the film’s frankness when it comes to sex work as a means to stay alive for these characters, and Reda’s drug addiction.
FLEIFEL: That's what I encountered, in my experience. The first thing that happened in A World Not Ours, when my friend went to Athens, I called him: “So what's happening? What are you doing? How are you getting by?” And he was telling me what he was getting up to very frankly, and then I said, “I'm gonna come and see you.” And later I made Xenos [2014], a short film about it. I asked him to go and show me the parks, and so I’m filming them while his voice is telling me what was going on there. After once, twice, three times of calling your parents and asking them to send you money, it becomes embarrassing. So what else do they have to do? Well, they can sell drugs, they can steal, or go to the park. I just wanted to show that this is what Reda does, what he has to do to survive.
With Reda Al-Saleh, who appears in my films A Man Returned [2016] and 3 Logical Exits [2020], I went to make a third part with him when he went back to Athens, and six months later he died of an overdose, having left his wife and three kids back in the camp. I remember on his youngest son's first birthday, we went to this bakery and bought a cake and took a picture to send it to him. And so I was really kind of extracting from Reda Al-Saleh for Reda and Chatila in To a Land Unknown.
It’s this sense of shame, too. I remember while I was in Athens in 2011, a guy died from an overdose, and the boys didn't know what to do. Who's gonna call his father and tell him the most shameful thing ever, that his son has died from an overdose? And eventually one of them found the courage to do it, and when he called the father he didn't want to know about it: “I don't know what you're talking about. It can’t be my son. Don’t call again.”
To a Land Unknown (Mahdi Fleifel, 2024).
NOTEBOOK: What made you want to shoot on film for this? The 16mm is so beautiful.
FLEIFEL: Well, if you want to make film, you shoot on film. It’s an organic thing that is alive. Digital is merciless, it’s sterile. It's like vegan cheese or something. Why not just eat cheese? For me, film is human. It's a living thing, and it's part of that human experience. Also, it gives a certain discipline on set. You have to think about what you're going to shoot, you can’t just shoot it and think about it later. I think what digital has done is created lazy filmmakers. You know, why don't we shoot both? Why don't we shoot everything and then we'll figure it out later? No. It's a lack of concentration, and it's actually lazy. So I really wanted to have a sense of discipline. And the grains and the beautiful living things that come out. Even in the [color] grade, I was like, “Don't remove all this stuff. Don’t do a Botox job on it.” I also wanted to create this timeless look, as if I was watching a film made in the ’70s. This is my favorite cinema, ’70s Hollywood, even though a lot of it is overly masculine. It's misogynistic. This is what I grew up watching, and I actually wanted to embrace that because it suited the world, a world of men and dog-eat-dog behavior.
16mm was a no-brainer. But my director of photography was hesitant, funnily enough. It's also made some newbies a bit lazy because they just want to go to sleep, they don't want to wait for the lab results. But his concern was that Athens at night is really dark, and it's true, we didn’t know if we could push the film that far. But when we did the tests, he was like, “Hey, let's just go for real cheese.”
Read all of our Cannes 2024 coverage here.