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Seattle International Film Festival: To A Land Unknown
May 23 @ 1:15 pm - 3:15 pm PDT
Want a discount on your ticket? Use code ARABISH51 for $3 when purchasing tickets!
Mahdi Fleifel, who made the great documentary A World Not Ours (SIFF 2013) about the Ein el-Helweh refugee camp in Lebanon, where his parents were born, returns to the Festival with his fiction debut, To a Land Unknown.
The refugees in this story have made out of their camp and travelled to Athens, where they are stranded en route to Germany. Chatila is clever and resourceful, and it falls to him to come up with a plan; Reda, his cousin, is sweet but hapless, owing in part to a weakness for drugs. To raise the money they need for fake passports, they resort to increasingly desperate crimes: stealing, sex work, human trafficking. To sustain themselves, they nurture the fantasy of the café they plan to open in Germany, where Chatila’s wife will cook, and they’ll make enough money to bring the rest of their family, currently stuck in the camp.
While films about refugees are not uncommon, what sets this film apart is the way the director puts us squarely in Chatila and Reda’s shoes as they try to figure out how to reach their final destination, how to keep themselves alive in the meanwhile, and how to do it all without losing their humanity in the process.
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