Skip to main content
To a Land Unknown film image; two men sat on bench with skateboard

Cousins Chatila and Reda have swapped Palestine for Athens, where they’re living hand to mouth with half a dozen other refugees in a broken down apartment. They’re desperate to make the next step. Germany represents the land of opportunity. But for that they need passports, and safe passage, and these things do not come cheap on the black market. Petty thefts aren’t moving the needle and Reda is falling back on drugs. But Chatila hatches an ingenious plan that might get them over the line, so long as they can pull it off…

Part crime thriller, part social issues drama, To a Land Unknown shows how dire circumstances and desperation can unravel even the surest moral compass. Writer-director Mahdi Fleifel was born in a Lebanese refugee camp, which he documented in the acclaimed 2012 film A World Not Ours. His first dramatic feature is likewise grounded in lived experience, even as it draws on familiar models. The fraught but intense bond between the cousins recalls Midnight Cowboy, Dog Day Afternoon and Mean Streets. A subplot involving a 13-year-old child and a vulnerable Greek woman (Angeliki Papoulia, from Dogtooth) kick in around the hour mark and raises the stakes considerably — but doesn’t go where you might expect. It’s a chastening film, but utterly compelling.

Crafted with tremendous empathy… This is a confident, angry, fully-realized drama.

Catherine Bray, Variety

To A Land Unknown is a tour-de-force of empathic storytelling, with its genre narrative bursting with an overabundance of humanity.

Sophie Monks Kaufman, IndieWire

Director

Mahdi Fleifel

Cast

Mahmood Bakri, Aram Sabbah, Angeliki Papoulia, Mohammad Alsurafa, Monzer Reyahnah

Credits
Country of Origin

Greece/Denmark/UK/Netherlands

Year

2024

Language

In Greek, Arabic and English with English subtitles

19+
107 min
Nakba FilmWorks, Inside Out Films

Book Tickets

Tuesday July 22

8:50 pm
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema
Book Now

Wednesday July 23

4:00 pm
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
Book Now

Thursday July 24

5:50 pm
Hearing Assistance Subtitles
VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre
Book Now

Credits

Executive Producer

Sawsan Asfari, Frank Barat, Francois de Villers, Elisa van Waeyenberge

Producer

Geoff Arbourne

Screenwriter

Fyzal Boulifa, Mahdi Fleifel, Jason McColgan

Cinematography

Thodoris Mihopoulos

Editor

Halim Sabbagh

Original Music

Nadah El Shazly

Art Director

Ioanna Soulele

Also Playing

Sinners

Dir. Ryan Coogler
137 min

This year's unexpected box office sleeper is that rare beast, a genre movie full of bold invention and surprise. We are in Mississippi in the early 1930s, and the opening of a new blues joint on the edge of town is the signal for all hell to break out.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Rachel, Rachel

Dir. Paul Newman
101 min

The story of a shy schoolteacher whose sexual awakening in her mid-30s leads to a deeper re-evaluation of her life, the film is sensitive and sympathetic, as well as a surprising directorial debut from Paul Newman.

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre

The Cloud-Capped Star

Dir. Ritwak Ghatak
127 min

Ritwik Ghatak is the unsung genius of Bengali cinema. His best known film is a a brilliantly structured melodrama about the terrible demands of poverty and family on the prospects of a young woman.

VIFF Centre - VIFF Cinema

Wanda

Dir. Barbara Loden
103 min

Barbara Loden's vérité feminist masterpiece, a landmark in the history of women filmmakers -- and "the anti-Bonnie & Clyde". "Writer-director-actor Barbara Loden's 1970 feature has a wonderful, hard-won sense of everyday rapture," Chuck Bowen, Slant

VIFF Centre - Lochmaddy Studio Theatre