Unpacking statelessness and survival in Danish-Palestinian film director Mahdi Fleifel's To a Land Unknown

Mahdi Fleifel is not a filmmaker interested in telling the stories of cookie-cutter heroes. To A Land Unknown is a resounding statement of that fact.

Set in Athens, the gutwrenching drama centres on two Palestinian cousins, Chatila and Reda, who are trying to steal, scam and cheat their way to a better life in Greece for themselves and the loved ones they left behind.

It's a purgatorial existence for these young men and Mahdi challenges the audience to empathise with their plight even when their actions become increasingly morally questionable.

"I try to be honest with the human experience," Mahdi tells The New Arab over video call ahead of the film's BFI London Film Festival premiere in October. "Human beings are not perfect. We're not always pure."

The early work of Martin Scorsese proved especially formative. He fell in love with the likes of Mean Street, Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, films that served up antiheroes "you could easily discard as a bunch of assholes," he says, "but there's something brutally honest and human about them."

The seed of this new story was planted 12 years ago after Mahdi completed his first feature, the acclaimed documentary A World Not Ours. The award-winning film offered a sweet, melancholy portrait of a multigenerational family trapped in southern Lebanon's Ain el-Helweh refugee camp.

"I ended up in Greece and this whole new world opened [up to me] with these young men from the camps, stranded in this purgatory, trying to make it to Northern Europe"

The camp was meant to be a temporary haven for Palestinians in exile following the Nakba of 1948 but has since become a permanent refuge for 70,000 displaced people. Mahdi spent his early childhood there before becoming a Danish resident and later graduating from the UK's National Film and Television School.

His subsequent documentary shorts, such as 2014's Xenos and 2016's A Man Returned, have concerned the tumultuous experiences of Palestinians in exile.

"I ended up in Greece and this whole new world opened [up to me] with these young men from the camps, stranded in this purgatory, trying to make it to Northern Europe," Mahdi says, who spent years witnessing what they were going through and found it difficult to judge.

"It would be too easy for me to just say, 'I certainly wouldn't do that.' I've never been in a position where I've had to steal, manipulate, kidnap someone or prostitute myself. I have a certain privilege in life."

Mahdi made several attempts at the script over the years but was struggling to effectively examine these authentic stories in a fictional space. "One thing that I learned from documentary-making is the search for truth in any given moment or scene or a performance," he says. "I wanted to hold on to that moving into fiction."

With the help of cowriters Fyzal Boulifa and Jason McColgan, however, and John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, he finally cracked it.

"George and Lenny have been living with me ever since I was a kid," Mahdi says of the 1937 novella's dual protagonists and their influence on his characterisation of Chatila and Reda.

"You're a sort of alien because nobody wants you... You're illegal. You don't have any documents, you don't have anyone to protect you, you just have to navigate through this jungle and survive"

In the American literary classic, smart but uneducated George is protective of his friend Lenny (who has learning disabilities) as they drift from farm to farm as migrant workers hoping to earn enough money to buy a plot of land of their own.

In To A Land Unknown, Chatila similarly feels the pressure to look after his recovering heroin-addict cousin Reda while trying to raise funds to escape their impoverished limbo.

Their complicated friendship proves a potent vehicle through which to explore the torment of statelessness, poverty and marginalisation and its varying effects on the masculine psyche, in this case, of Arab men.

"You're a sort of alien because nobody wants you," says Mahdi. "You're illegal. You don't have any documents, you don't have anyone to protect you, you just have to navigate through this jungle and survive."

Initially, the filmmaker wanted to cast unknowns. "A lot of the time, the worst [thing] actors can do is act," he explains. "I wanted to work with the right personalities [who] already embodied, or had some elements of, the characters that I could intuitively sense, then bring it out in the process."

However, after a lengthy casting process that saw him audition "20 to 30 actors" for each lead role, he found his Chatila and Reda in Mahmood Bakri and Aram Sabbah.

Mahdi wasn't originally convinced by Mahmood, who is part of the well-known Bakri acting family. "I had seen Alam and Mahmood certainly didn't look anything like I had imagined [for Chatila]," recalls the filmmaker.

Once the actor shaved his head for a self-tape audition, Mahdi could see it. "There was suddenly an edge to him; then in the workshops, he became more and more convincing," he says.

"He had that sensitivity, a certain pain that you could sense. I could buy that he was newly married, he had a child, and that he could also charm someone and be a leader."

Aram was cast a week before production after their original actor could not secure a work visa out from Jordan to Greece. They worked Aram's skater skills into the character and made him and Mahmood live together before and during the shoot.

"I could sense that there was a chemistry between them already," Mahdi recalls. "The fact that they lived together meant they were able to rehearse their scenes before the shoot — this helped gel them as cousins and friends."

Their sensitive and considered performances have rightly been praised by critics from across the globe ever since the film premiered during Directors’ Fortnight at the 77th Cannes Film Festival held earlier in May. Its arrival is especially resonant too.

"I wanted anyone from anywhere in the world to be able to connect with these people in the situation that they are in"

The world continues to witness genocidal warfare and war crimes inflicted on innocent men, women and children by Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and now Lebanon too.

While Mahdi Fleifel's film doesn't fit neatly into the more inspirational storytelling of an oppressed people, it does speak to the wider reality of how decades of violent marginalisation, discrimination and inhumane occupation can tarnish the human spirit.

"I wanted anyone from anywhere in the world to be able to connect with these people in the situation that they are in, here and now," he says.

"I've never seen myself as an activist or a political person but the fact that I'm Palestinian automatically puts me under suspicion and stories about Palestinians automatically become activism."

Hanna Flint is a British-Tunisian critic, broadcaster and author of Strong Female Character: What Movies Teach Us. Her reviews, interviews and features have appeared in GQ, the Guardian, Elle, Town & Country, Mashable, Radio Times, MTV, Time Out, The New Arab, Empire, BBC Culture and elsewhere

Follow her on Instagram: @hannainesflint