From A World Not Ours to a Land Unknown

To a Land Unknown, Mahdi Fleifel’s devastating fiction debut, provides a masterful bookend to his first feature-length documentary, A World Not Ours, on growing up in the Palestinian refugee camp Ain el-Hilweh.

Jim Quilty

There is a much-loved phrase among screenwriters, tossed off at pivotal moments by action heroes and wretched victims alike: “What have we got to lose?” In To a Land Unknown, Mahdi Fleifel’s first feature-length fiction, it has particular resonance.

The film tells the story of Shatila and Reda, who grew up in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon and are desperate to make a new life in Germany. Like many young men forced to emigrate to Europe informally, the cousins get stuck in Athens, sleeping in a flophouse packed with undocumented migrants. They survive on whatever money they can scrape together from petty crime and prostitution, saving up to secure fake passports so they can slip into Germany.

As the early sequences reveal, the two are unquestionably moral individuals, though of differing character. A skater who takes his board wherever he goes, Reda (Aram Sabbah) is relaxed and soft-hearted. Shatila (Mahmood Bakri) is intense and focused, hoping to eventually emulate his father’s success as a café owner. Impatient to reunite with the young wife and infant son he left behind in the camp, he’s the one tasked with managing the duo’s cash and is the brains behind their efforts to raise the money they need. The agony of their predicament affects the two men differently: Reda is prone to depression and has a history of drug abuse (rife among becalmed urban men, including those stranded in refugee camps and informal migrant gatherings), which may be why his previous sojourn in Athens ended with his humiliating return to the camp he had escaped. After they lose their savings, Shatila becomes more ruthless. Reda struggles to keep up.

To a Land Unknown implicitly asks: When you’ve already lost everything, what have you got to lose? The answer that unfurls over the film’s unremitting 100-odd minutes is devastating in its precision and veracity.

From Ain al-Hilweh to Athens

Fleifel’s 2012 debut feature, A World Not Ours, marked a departure from previous nonfiction depictions of existence in Lebanon’s refugee camps. The film’s locus is his parents’ original home, Ain al-Hilweh in the southern port town of Saida, historically Lebanon’s largest, most raucous, refugee camp. Narrated in Fleifel’s North American-accented voiceover, the film is a coming-of-age tale, a loving contemplation of childhood visits to the camp, whose narrative hinges on seeing past childish illusions as just that.

Fleifel says he really did grow up in Ain al-Hilweh, and it was in that camp where he realized his desire to capture images on film. He spent much of his time there at a local cinema, watching action movies with his grandfather’s younger brother Said, the highlight of these years being the football World Cup, when being among 70,000 refugees jammed into the camp’s 1.5 square kilometers “was the best place in the world to be.”

World Cup reminiscences provide an upbeat and accessible framing narrative for the introduction of Said and Bassam “Abu Iyad” Taha. With the filmmaker’s grandfather (who hadn’t left the camp since arriving at the age of 16), these two men are the film’s principal protagonists, and Fleifel unveils their complexity of character with all the care of a screenwriter.

Abu Iyad had been with Yasser Arafat’s Fatah movement since he was a boy, and while his PLO allowance provided just enough money for coffee and cigarettes, he’d eventually quit the organization in frustration. “The Palestinians really fucked us over,” Abu Iyad tells the camera in a desolate moment, raging against the leadership that had destroyed the revolution. “I don’t want to go back to Palestine,” he rails. “I wish Israel would kill every last one of us.”

As Fleifel recounts the dissolution of his youthful impressions, the film resolves into a clear-eyed document of the carceral regime of Lebanon’s refugee camps and its psycho-social impact upon those detained there. The filmmaker’s point is clear: His naïve memories of the camp as a place of community were sustained by his freedom to come and go. Those like Abu Iyad, who could not escape Ain al-Hilweh, were left stunted.

The film closes with a possibly hopeful coda, when Abu Iyad announces he’ll be smuggled to Greece. Fleifel follows him to Athens, where he finds him living on the street with several other Palestinian refugees, his efforts to get to western Europe landing him in a Serbian prison for three months. By the time the filmmaker catches up with Abu Iyad the following summer, several of his pals were about to be deported back to Lebanon. Abu Iyad himself landed back in Ain al-Hilweh two days after that footage was shot.

Over the next few years, Fleifel elaborated upon the Athens experience, releasing a number of well-regarded short films dedicated to the stories of Abu Iyad and Reda al-Saleh, another child of Fatah, and a handful of other young men from Ain al-Hilweh who had followed smugglers’ routes to Europe.[1] Taken as a suite, these shorts sketch a contemporary phase of the Palestinian refugee condition – mingling with the clandestine migratory drift of the global precariat.

For us Palestinians, forgetting would simply mean ceasing to exist. Our struggle throughout history until today is to be visible. —Mahdi Fleifel

Descent from despair

To a Land Unknown is a collaboration that more fully realizes the nuanced complexities drafted in Fleifel’s shorts. The filmmaker says he started working on To a Land Unknown in 2011. During its years of development and production, the project’s working title was Men in the Sun. Like A World Not Ours, the title is borrowed from the nonfiction-based fictions of Ghassan Kanafani, whose alienated, marginalized protagonists clearly offered some inspiration.

Fleifel co-wrote the feature with Moroccan helmer Fyzal Boulifa (The Damned Don’t Cry) and Irish writer Jason McColgan. His cast mingles seasoned actors with non-professionals. Mahmood Bakri is the son of actor-filmmaker Mohammad Bakri and the brother of Saleh Bakri (The Time that Remains). Angeliki Papoulia, who plays Tatiana, is an early collaborator of Yorgos Lanthimos. Like most of the cast, Aram Sabbah had never acted before. The ensemble’s performances are utterly convincing.

The premise of To a Land Unknown thickens into a plot as more characters enter the frame. It begins in the film’s opening sequence with the arrival of a 13-year-old Palestinian orphan, Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa). The boy had the moxie to secure a passage to Italy where his aunt awaits him, but the smuggler to whom he was entrusted followed the prevailing practice and dumped his cargo in Greece. Reda and Shatila reluctantly let Malik bunk with them and introduce him to their smuggler, Marwan (Munzer Reyahnah). When Marwan insists on being paid in advance before doing the job (another industry benchmark), Shatila hatches a plot that will deliver Malik to his aunt and earn Reda and himself the money to pay for their fake passports.

Another key figure in the plot is Tatiana (Papoulia), who is among the down-at-heel Greek nationals who hang out in the rundown public square where the protagonists run their scam operations. She introduces herself to Shatila while watching him take a selfie with a piece of cake and a candle, the only gift he can send to his son on his birthday. She invites him to come home with her. He declines, but later hooks up with her when he realizes that, poor, lonely, and generous as she is, Tatiana could be useful in his plans for Malik, Reda and himself.

A second jail-break scheme emerges from the ruins of the first. It involves a couple of other Palestinian refugees wandering the streets of Athens. Yasser (Mohammad Ghassan) is a big young fellow who first asks Reda to swipe a new pair of Nikes for him, then refuses to pay the promised sum because, he claims, they are half a size too small. The most memorable of Fleifel’s minor figures goes by the name Abu Hub, “Father of Love,” (Mouataz Alshaltouh). This oily and ever-smiling sleeveen is the local drug dealer (feeding Reda’s heroin habit) who is also fond of poetry. Fleifel leaves the audience to decide which of these activities inspired his nickname. At one point, in the midst of Shatila and Reda’s second escape attempt, he recites a few lines from “In Praise of the High Shadow,” a much-loved poem of Mahmoud Darwish.

“Did you write that?” Yasser asks.

“That was Mahmoud Darwish,” he replies, amused. “Do you know Mahmoud Darwish?”

In the final sequence of To a Land Unknown, the camera is fixed on Shatila and Reda sitting alone on a bus. The driver tells Shatila the road is closed, so he must go by another route. The bus descends into a tunnel, bathing the frame into gloom. By the time they re-emerge into the light, Shatila knows that there is always something precious left to lose.

Note

[1] The 13-minute Xeno’ (stranger or enemy, in Greek) 2014, documents Abu Iyad’s time in Athens, where he found himself trapped in Greece’s economic collapse. Unable to find work, he and a few other Palestinian refugees had to resort to prostitution and theft to get by, assuaging their humiliation through drug abuse. Subsequent Athens shorts focus on Reda al-Saleh, who appears briefly among Abu Iyad’s 20-something pals in A World Not Ours and Xenos. In Fleifel’s 30-minute A Man Returned, 2016, Saleh returns to Ain al-Hilweh, after three years in Athens and many unsuccessful asylum applications. He arrives a heroin addict, and tells Fleifel that upon his return, Lebanese police told him he was wanted for crimes committed in Lebanon while he was physically in Greece. Saleh found hope in a young woman he met soon after returning, and Fleifel films his preparations for their wedding ceremony. In the 15-minute 3 Logical Exits, 2020, Saleh is now a father preparing to return to Europe, though if he sets foot outside the camp he faces possible arrest. Accompanying contemporary images of Saleh (and the filmmaker’s earlier footage in the camp and Athens) is Fleifel’s voiceover telephone conversation with researcher Marie Kortam, who describes how young men have three ways to escape the camp – dealing and doing drugs, joining a militant group, or migrating. As the short ends, a fourth means of escape is also suggested: death. Fleifel’s most obvious experimentation with fiction in his cycle of shorts is the 15-minute 2017 work A Drowning Man, which fictionalizes a day in the life of a young Palestinian in Athens, whose encounters echo some of those alluded to Xenos.