TO A LAND UNKNOWN - Mark Reviews Movies

To a Land Unknown, Watermelon Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 10, 2025

There is really nothing "right" that cousins Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) can do. To a Land Unknown puts them in an impossible situation: living as undocumented refugees from Gaza in Athens, stuck in a place they don't want to be, and with no legal, feasible, or safe way to get where they want to go to start a new life. The destination is Germany, and while it may be only a thousand or so miles away geographical, it might as well be on another planet, for as likely as it is that the two men will get there.

Co-writer/director Mahdi Fleifel's film gets right to the core of these men's situation. It is desperation, pure and plain and simple, and that is how Chatila and Reda act from the very start of this story. They spend their days hanging out in a park, because the off-the-books hostel-like place where they live isn't exactly one to spend one's days, and looking for easy targets. They're thieves, also plain and simple, but even their crimes are small.

Reda distracts a woman, for example, by falling off his skateboard, and Chatila grabs the purse she just put down next to her on the bench. The risk is low enough, and the ill-gotten reward is even lesser. The single banknote they find in the woman's wallet doesn't even seem to be worth the pang of Reda's conscience when he notices an inhaler in the purse, too. Surely, Reda argues that there must be a way for them to return the woman's medication, but Chatila wonders what his cousin expects the pair to do. Does he really want them to go back to the woman they just robbed?

There's no room for kindness in this situation, and that's the terrible reality Fleifel, Fyzai Boulifa, and Jason McColgan's screenplay establishes immediately and expands from there. Things keep getting worse for Chatila and Reda, because there's no other way for it to go for these men—without a home, with dreams that seem so close, with everything and everyone appearing to work against them. Out of basic necessity and increasing desperation, the men's actions continue to reflect how much worse that situation becomes.

The drama of the film, then, is basically a matter of a mathematical equation, in which everything will remain equal. The situation for Chatila and Reda as it is when we first meet them is all about getting money. It remains that way throughout, but initially, it's just to obtain enough cash to pay off Marwan (Mondher Rayahneh), a local guy who can get anything and move anyone for the right price. The cousins want European passports so that can travel from Greece to Germany without raising suspicion. Marwan has found a couple of passports with photos of men who look enough like each of the cousins, and from their petty thefts, Chatila has been saving and hiding money.

The first snag is that Reda, who has been sober under his cousin's watchful eye and harsh judgment, finds the cash that Chatila has been hiding as much from him as anyone else. He buys and uses some heroin, because it's just a "one-time" thing, the two are so close to their goal, the opportunity arose, and any other excuse he might make. The film wisely doesn't judge, because all of this is difficult enough as it is, without the filmmakers adding any moral scolding. The moral outrage beneath the surface of the story, in which two men who don't believe they have a home try to find some place they can have some kind of life, is more than enough.

Beyond that, the other major source of conflict here is between the respective worldviews of the two cousins. Reda, who genuinely did hope to find some way to return the woman's medication to her, still believes there's some room to do some good, no matter how bad things may become for him. Chatila is entirely pragmatic, bordering on cynical, about other people and his own actions. When a young Palestinian boy named Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa) asks the two men for some help, Reda wants to, but Chatila points out that it's hard enough for the two cousins to care for themselves without a boy adding to their needs.

It's only when Malik, whose mother has died and father is absent, reveals that he has an aunt waiting for him Italy that Chatila sees an opportunity. If he and Reda can arrange to smuggle the kid into Italy, the aunt can pay them, instead of some random, wholly untrustworthy human traffickers. Chatila comes up with a plan to enlist Tatiana (Angeliki Papoulia), a lonely and desperate Greek woman, to help fly Malik to Italy.

A lot of the screenplay, obviously, is a matter of plotting—the mechanics of the scheme and the tightrope walk of how many things could go wrong in this plan. Even so, the filmmakers ensure that we comprehend just how hopeless the situation is for Chatila and Reda, understand what drives the two men and separates them in terms of their fundamental beliefs, and suspect that anything that might seem relatively simple in this scenario cannot be so.

To a Land Unknown finds new and increasingly perilous, as well as unsettling, ways to escalate problems for and, reflecting how bad things get, terrible choices by our protagonists. The film is so grounded in the reality of the harshness of both this situation and humanity more generally that one thought keeps springing to mind: It doesn't need to be like this.

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