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To a Land Unknown’s Destination Is Heartbreak
Filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel’s portrait of Palestinian cousins stuck in Greece is a devastating examination of how statelessness transforms people.
In the intermittent years, Fleifel directed a number of short films about Palestinian culture and history, including 2015’s 20 Handshakes for Peace and I Signed the Petition, alternately furious and searching explorations of how exile alters political opinions and changes personal priorities. But for those in the know, it’s another way in which the film’s melancholy milieu feels urgently tied to the present, ongoing destruction of Gaza and the increased violence in the West Bank — and supports Fleifel’s thesis that displacement is the first step in the murder of the human spirit. When the friends finally reach a point of no return in their relationship, Bakri plays the disruption with savage enterprise and Sabbah with wounded silence, realization dawning on his face that Chatila, the man he considers his closest ally in the world, sees him as just another body to be taken advantage of.
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