Sitting on an Athens park bench with their skateboards, with pigeons scouring the ground for food at their feet, the cousins at the heart of “To a Land Unknown” scan their surroundings for their next target. They need money, badly. They need a purse to steal. Palestinian refugees, Chatila and his younger cousin Reda have been stranded here a while. Chatila’s wife and two-year-old son, stuck in their own limbo in a Lebanese refugee camp, live with uncertain hopes of meeting up with the cousins in Germany.
This is the universal lament and staggering human cost of refugee displacement, dramatized in Danish-Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel’s tense, coolly heartbreaking debut narrative feature. “To a Land Unknown,” premiering this week at Facets Film Forum, focuses on these loving, sometimes hating cousins, who dream of opening a cafe in their chosen land unknown. Realizing this dream will require a series of anxious gambles and bargains with their lives, and the lives of others.
It’s an existence balanced between “what is and what must be,” as another refugee says, quoting “Praise for the High Shadow” by Mahmoud Darwish. That’s the poetry; Fleifel’s film favors well-paced if slightly schematic prose, though the actors are more than good enough to keep you with these people every fraught minute.
It’s a movie of many deadlines. The first is the two weeks that the cagey, quietly ruthless Chatila has to secure fake passports for himself and the softer-hearted addict Reda. Early in the story, the cousins encounter 13-year-old Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), a Gazan refugee whose human trafficker, he tells the men, dumped him in Greece instead of reuniting him with his mother, now living in Italy. Everyone in “To a Land Unknown” seeks some distant shore they can call home, with the promise of reminding them, in some way, of three simple words heard at the very end of the story: “the old neighborhood.”
Chatila’s the emergent protagonist in the script by Fyzal Boulifa, Jason McColgan and director Fleifel, and in the compelling, un-showy performance by Mahmood Bakri, the story’s escalating tensions never feel actor-engineered. Cousin Reda, whom Chatila patronizes one minute and loves like a brother the next, may well be the biggest obstacle to a further shore. Aram Sabbah makes this sweet, lost soul a dimensional presence.
Much of “To a Land Unknown” deals with the cousins’ entry into human trafficking, by way of the hard-drinking Greek national Tatiana (Angeliki Papoulia, “Dogtooth”) who becomes Chatila’s lover. She’s lured, with a promise of pay, into posing as the orphan’s mother, accompanying him to Italy. It’s a long shot. But it might get the cousins where they’re headed, in Germany (a proper European nation, argues Chatila).
There are only so many ways “To a Land Unknown” can conclude its storytelling business and not sell itself short, along with the omnipresent refugee crisis stories we live every minute on this planet. Yet the co-writer and director, who earliest years in a Lebanese refugee camp are the subject of his 2012 documentary “A World Not Ours,” knows where he’s going. The focus tightens ever more effectively on two ordinary men, searching, yearning, stealing, surviving however — and if — they can.
“To a Land Unknown” — 3 stars (out of 4)
No MPA rating (language, sexuality, some violence)
Running time: 1:46
How to watch: Chicago premiere at Facets Film Forum, 1517 W. Fullerton Ave.; 3 and 5 p.m. Sat. July 19; 1 and 3 p.m. Sun. July 20; 7 p.m. Thurs. July 24. In Arabic, Greek and English with English subtitles.
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
