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‘To a Land Unknown’ Review: Palestinian Filmmaker’s Narrative Debut Channels the Spirit of ‘The Bicycle Thieves’
Mahdi Fleifel's 'To a Land Unknown' delivers a confident, fully-realized drama featuring a lead performance from Mahmood Bakri.
As with the street-hustle dynamic between Chaplin’s Little Tramp and Jackie Coogan’s titular character in “The Kid,” there’s a sense of equality between them despite their respective ages and of role reversal as the boy proves more effective than his older protector in bargaining over the price of stolen sneakers. The screenplay, from Fyzal Boulifa, Mahdi Fleifel and Jason McColgan, avoids perpetuating the fallacy of the “deserving poor,” whereby an imagined class of morally unimpeachable people in tough circumstances are seen as acceptable recipients of aid, but only as long as they can prove their innocence, and sometimes not even then. Working with DP Thodoros Mihopoulos, Fleifel sticks close to his characters throughout, a strategy that helps keep the audience connected to the specifics of their story, rather than being overwhelmed by statistics or numbed by the sense of impotence that a panoramic view of the injustices faced by the likes of Chatila and Reda might inspire.
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