The film-maker Mahdi Fleifel grew up in Ein el-Hilweh, the same Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon where his parents were born.
It’s a complicated personal history forged by three generations of statelessness. He was born in Dubai in 1979. The family returned to Ein el-Hilweh in the mid-1980s, then emigrated to Denmark.
In common with many families, Fleifel’s father recorded his relatives with a video camera. Fleifel, too, recorded his friends and family during return visits to the camp. His footage forms the spine of the body of work that has followed.
Fleifel rose to international prominence a decade ago with A World Not Ours, a multigenerational documentary portrait of life in the camp, featuring the director’s pigeon-fancying Uncle Said and his 80-year-old grandfather, who has lived in Ein el-Hilweh since he was 16.
The frustrations of statelessness cast a dark shadow on many of Fleifel’s subjects, although the wryly humorous documentary makes merry with the camp’s obsession with the Fifa World Cup.
“I don’t see myself as a political film-maker. I’m a storyteller. And I tell stories about exiles,” he says.
Marrying documentary, fiction and personal testimony, A Drowning Man, from 2017, is a semi-autobiographical account of a Palestinian man trying to get through a day in Athens. I Signed the Petition, from the following year, looks at the pressures against campaigners for the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement.
Fleifel’s first narrative feature is To a Land Unknown, a refugee-themed thriller that premiered at Cannes and closed Galway Film Fleadh last year.
“I’m usually like a musician who’s unplugged with my camera,” he says. “My docs are about my friends and family. It’s a first-person point of view. I’m very close to my characters and my subjects. This is a different thing: positioning the camera, creating the universe, setting the light, dressing the characters in costume, thinking about colour palettes, all these things.
“There’s this old Hitchcock saying that I keep going back to. Hitchcock says that in fiction the director is God, but in documentary God is the director.
“I don’t think I’m God. After A World Not Ours came seven shorter documentaries. I essentially followed four guys, and one of them was Abu Eyad, who was in A World Not Ours and the short film Xenos. He’s now in Germany. One was Reda, who sadly died of an overdose in Athens. He was in A Man Returned and 3 Logical Exits. You could say that the guys I’ve followed in my documentaries are field research and that this is my PhD, the culmination of everything.”
To a Land Unknown opens with a quote from Edward Said, the late Palestinian-American academic, critic and activist: “In a way, it’s a sort of fate of Palestinians not to end up where they started but somewhere unexpected and far away.”
This is true for the Palestinian cousins Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah), who have escaped a refugee camp in Lebanon only to find themselves stranded in Athens en route to Germany.
“Greece is the gateway to Europe if you’re coming from the Middle East,” says the film-maker. “Most of these guys that I was following are from the camps in Lebanon or Syria. Some of them are coming from Jordan. You have to go through Greece. And that becomes their purgatory.
“It’s like limbo. It’s a stopover in Europe, but it’s not the Europe that you’re interested in. It’s not the El Dorado of France or Germany. It’s very close to home in many ways. Economically, it’s difficult. The whole social fabric is different.
[ Renée Zellweger: ‘To choose not to have children isn’t that exceptional, is it?’Opens in new window ]
“When I was following my friend for A World Not Ours, he left the camp towards the end of the film and went to Europe. And he ended up stranded in Athens. I went to see him because I was documenting his story, and I became obsessed with his predicament.”
For Chatila and Reda, that predicament is a quagmire of low-level criminality. Together they snatch bags, steal sneakers to order (only to be haggled with) and scheme in the hope of buying passage to Germany. There are distinct echoes of Lennie and George from Of Mice and Men, or Joe and Ratso in Midnight Cowboy.
Chatila, the more proactive of the pair, dreams of opening a small cafe in Berlin, from where he can work, legally earn money and send for his family, who are currently living in a camp in Lebanon. Reda, who is an occasional rent boy, upends Chatila’s attempts to save money with relapses into heroin addiction.
Shame is a thing that refugees are constantly carrying around wherever they go. There is the shame of having left your loved ones behind
Reda’s weakness leaves the duo in need of a precarious big score, made more urgent by the pair’s friendship with a 13-year-old Palestinian kid, Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), who’s trying to join his aunt in Germany.
“The cinematic world that I miss watching today is the one that I grew up watching,” Fleifel says. “My first love is 1970s and 1980s Hollywood cinema. That’s what I grew up on before I knew how films were made. I wanted to pay a certain homage to that, especially buddy movies, whether it’s Midnight Run or Beverly Hills Cop or 48 Hours or Lethal Weapon. Those have all fed into the making of this film.”
Reluctant criminals have populated cinema since a robbed musician broke bad in The Musketeers of Pig Alley, DW Griffith’s gangster reel from 1912. Fleifel’s keen sense of social justice and documentary realism places To a Land Unknown in the same hybrid genre as The Bicycle Thieves or the more nail-biting works of the Dardenne brothers.
Quite unlike the lawless swagger of the Scorsese beats that inspired the screenplay (which Fleifel wrote with Jason McColgan and Fyzal Boulifa, the director of The Damned Don’t Cry), there’s a palpable sense of shame.
“That was definitely an aspect of life that I came across,” Fleifel says. “Shame is a thing that refugees are constantly carrying around wherever they go. There is the shame of having left your loved ones behind. That is definitely the case with Chatila’s character.
“What is it like for a young man to have left his wife and son and not be able to be there for them? He might even need his wife to send him pocket money to get by. What does the shame of that do to you? And when there is no other means, there’s the shame of having to go and sell yourself in the park.
“I feel like a lot of these guys are carrying that around. I wanted to explore that. I wanted to really go there and capture those intimate, broken moments. This is certainly something we discussed when we were writing the script.”
The white-knuckle drama is driven by Mahmood Bakri’s frantic central performance as the caregiver and habitual rescuer of his feckless relative. Bakri heads an international cast.
“I was looking all over in Palestine, in Jordan, in Lebanon, in Athens,” Fleifel says. “We have Angeliki Papoulia, who is a star in Greece and known in European cinema from the Yorgos Lanthimos films. I remember telling my mother that we have the youngest son of Mohammad Bakri, and she said, ‘Oh, so it’s a real film’. They are known all over the Arab world.
I’m not an activist. I’m not a politician. I happen to be an exile from Palestine. People are waking up to the fact that we were robbed in broad daylight
“Getting a film made is a miracle. Getting a Palestinian film made is more than that. Because Palestinian cinema is so small, people just end up recycling the same cast. This is why I was reluctant to even work with Mahmoud, because I had already seen him.
“But then he auditioned for us. He shaved his head. He had a completely different look. There was an edge to him. And I thought, Okay, we are starting from a fresh place.”
In 2021 there were an estimated 9.2 million displaced Palestinians worldwide. In the past year they have been joined by many more. A lot of commentators and reviewers have seen an additional urgency in To a Land Unknown’s depiction of Palestinian refugees, but Fleifel is keen to stress a longer history of statelessness.
“I’m not an activist. I’m not a politician. I happen to be an exile from Palestine. People are waking up to the fact that we were robbed in broad daylight. There’s an ugly injustice going on, and, obviously, people want to know more. It’s a challenge to tell our stories, because there are forces that don’t want these stories to exist. They want to erase them. They want to make us invisible. But we are here.”
To a Land Unknown opens in cinemas on Friday, February 14th
