Screening times:
Thursday, August 14, 6:30 PM
Friday, August 15, 6:30 PM

Mahdi Fleifel | Palestine, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Greece, UK, France, Germany, Netherlands | 2024 | 89m
English, Greek and Arabic with English subtitles

Chatila (Mahmoud Bakri) and Reda (Aram Sabbah) are two Palestinian refugees, cousins, in Athens saving to pay for fake passports to find new lives in Germany. But when Reda loses their hard-earned cash to his dangerous drug addiction, Chatila hatches an extreme plan, which involves them posing as smugglers and taking hostages in an effort to get him and his best friend out of their hopeless environment before it is too late.

To A Land Unknown splices a docudrama inspired by what's happening right now in Europe — a migration drama featuring Palentinians far away from friends and family — with a gripping thriller. The stakes for these two men couldn't be higher, as the film asks the question: At what price freedom?

"As a son of Palestinian refugees who grew up in Denmark, this has been my story," says filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel. "I know what it means to live in exile, to be stateless, to not belong. But To A Land Unknown is not just another refugee film... I wanted to make my own seventies Hollywood cinema." In that he's succeeded, directing a film that could be a companion piece to Midnight Cowboy.

"To a Land Unknown presents the cousins’ ordeal as something no person should have to go through, something unnatural and surreal and Kafkaesque." - Roxana Hadadi, New York Magazine/Vulture

"To A Land Unknown, with its intimate gaze at stateless survivors, wraps its incisive observations about moral compromise in a tight story of crime gone wrong." - Jacob Oller, AV Club

"The sobering note on which the movie ends recalls a stone-cold classic from a sadly long-gone era of moviemaking. The homage actually functions as a token of this movie’s integrity and heartfelt sadness." - Glenn Kenny, RogerEbert.com

$12 ($11.40 cash at the door if available)