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Introducing…our TIFF 2024 podcast season! Alex Heeney explains why this season is for you, even if you aren’t attending, and what to expect from our themed episodes and TIFF coverage.
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Alex Heeney reviews Mahdi Fleifel’s films To a Land Unknown about Palestinian refugees stuck in limbo in Athens, trying to go to Europe. To a Land Unknown is one of the best sales titles at TIFF 2024./p>
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Athens becomes a hellish limbo for Palestinian refugees who have left the refugee camps behind in search of an ever-elusive passage into Europe for a new life. Based on the world exiled Palestinian filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel encountered while making his earlier documentaries in Athens, the fictional To a Land Unknown wears its origins on its sleeve with its cinema-verité shooting style.
To a Land Unknown follows two cousins – Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (skateboarder and first-time actor Aram Sabbah) – dreaming of a new life. Chatila has left his wife and son in a Lebanese refugee camp to keep his drug-addict cousin on the straight and narrow and find their next step. They’ve been stranded in Athens for so long that the city isn’t even an attractive tourist site. They talk about seeing the acropolis everywhere, but we never actually see it. And in one scene where they overlook a fantastic vista of Athens, the backdrop of the city is completely out of focus, so we can’t enjoy it either.
To survive, the pair turn to petty crime, which escalates as their desperation does, forcing them to question to what lengths they’re willing to go for a better future – and whether that future is even possible. A tense and often harrowing thriller, To a Land Unknown charts how good people can do bad things in an impossible situation, which forces every man to be out for only himself.
Most recent films about Palestinian experiences tend to be about Palestinians trapped in Occupied Territories or struggling with the culture clash of Israeli life. To a Land Unknown offers a different perspective and asks, what if you escape the Middle East but are caught in limbo? What then?
Mahmood Bakri gives an incredible turn as the more morally ambiguous Chatila. Having shaved the luscious locks he sported in Alam (TIFF ‘22) and The Teacher (TIFF ‘23), I didn’t recognize him at all, but I knew this was an incredibly charismatic actor who found every single beat for this character, a man who is constantly fretting and plotting. But I was convinced Bakri is one of the most exciting emerging actors to watch at TIFF when I realized the same actor gave an impressive lead turn in Alam.
Alex Heeney reviews the documentary No Other Land, one of the highlights of the Visions du Réel Festival. (It also screened the Berlinale.)
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Collaboratively made with multiple directors, the powerful, urgent, and incisive No Other Land serves as an excellent introduction to the Israeli settler-colonial state in Palestine. Shot over several years, the film follows the budding friendship between Israeli journalist Yuval Abraham, who is covering the conflict, and Palestinian citizen journalist Basel Adra, who has been documenting the evictions and demolitions of the houses in his community. As such, the film is also a story of allyship: the learning process required for the more privileged person who wants immediate change and the oppressed person’s hardened, more realistic perspective.
Featuring independently shot footage from each filmmaker, No Other Land practices what it preaches. Handheld footage from Adra documents the violent military action in his community as it happens. Cinematographer Rachel Szor’s more formal camerawork documents the tentative friendship between Adra and Abraham. All of this is mixed with archival footage, news footage, and beyond to craft a story of the injustices in Palestine told from multiple perspectives.
That said, the film never gives space to extremist perspectives. Hamas is virtually out of the picture, not even present as a menace to other Palestinians. Fiercely Zionist Israelis and Israeli settlers get no air time. Instead, Adra takes centre stage, while Abraham serves as an audience surrogate because we, like him, are learning about the exhaustion from years – decades – of fighting this battle and losing.
Early in the film, Yuval complains to Basel that his article isn’t getting enough clicks; Basel chastens him by reminding him that, though his enthusiasm is appreciated, they’ve been fighting this fight for decades, and change takes time. Set over multiple years, as more and more evictions and demolitions happen in Basel’s community, we start to understand what he means. It’s not just one horror but the repeated, ongoing horrors with no end in sight.
The panoply of perspectives in No Other Land is its greatest strength and weakness. The multiple perspectives tell a comprehensive story about the situation. But tracking who shot what and whose perspective we see at any given time can be challenging. Eventually, you can spot some of the messy videos that only Basel could have shot. None of this detracts too much from the immense achievement of No Other Land. Its innovative form and production process mean it will stumble here and there, as all films that break the rules do.