As a Palestinian, you’re already so beaten down; you’re displaced. You can’t go back freely, even if you wanted to. You’d have to go back to some ghettoised canton. It’s a state of occupation and terror and it’s meant to be difficult. You’re meant to constantly have questions about fucking Radiohead and shit like that. This is a feature of the displacement, of the disempowerment, man.
–from I Signed the Petition, 2018
Filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel was born in Dubai in 1979. He and his family moved to Elsinore, Denmark when he was nine. Mahdi’s resided in Copenhagen since 2019, returning after seventeen years of self-imposed exile in different parts of Europe. He spent his very early childhood summers visiting extended family in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon called Ain al-Hilweh – a place he’s documented for decades, a universe that has inspired all of his film work, in one way or another. Mahdi graduated from the National Film and Television School in the UK in 2009 where he studied fiction directing under Stephen Frears and Pawel Pawlikowski. In 2010, he co-founded London-based production company Nakba FilmWorks with producer, Patrick Campbell. In 2012, his début feature documentary about Ain al-Hilweh and his own family’s origin story called A World Not Ours, received over thirty film festival awards. His short film, A Man Returned received a Silver Bear Jury Prize at Berlinale 2016.
Even though he is technically a filmmaker-in-exile, Mahdi has had the very good fortune of a culturally diverse background – linguistically, culturally, educationally, socio-economically, we could even say philosophically. Having a camera around recording mundane everyday life by his father as far back as he can remember set him on a course of gazing at the world through a lens, one he’s kept very close to his heart.
In this conversation, recorded in Copenhagen at the end of March, Mahdi and I spoke about his filmic trajectory, leading up to finally realizing the fiction feature he’s been wanting to make since film school. To a Land Unknown is an independent co-production between UK, Palestine, France, The Netherlands, Germany, Greece, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. We also talk about the work he accomplished while patiently (and maybe sometimes impatiently) allowing his film script to evolve, finally finding its optimal form and purpose and the right co-screenwriting partner. It’s all based on real people, real events, the desperate existences of young stateless men, devising elaborate schemes to escape their lot, never letting go of the will to find their own El Dorado. To a Land Unknown has played at over one hundred festivals since its début at Cannes in May 2024. It’s had cinema releases in the UK, Ireland, France, Switzerland and Greece and in May, it will have its US cinema release, accompanied by releases in thirty-plus other territories around the world.
Pamela Cohn (PC): You started your filmmaking career with a feature-length documentary about your family and the community at Ain al-Hilweh refugee camp. In between that and finally making your début fiction feature, To a Land Unknown, you made seven short films, each very diverse in form, genre and approach – archival, diaristic, observational, experimental, fictional. Watching your body of work as a whole feels very novelistic in a way, the constant returns to the camp to document, and what happens to the young men who, once they get it in their minds to do so, scheme and plan to leave. The diversity of form and the various cinematic languages you use is impressive but they’re all of a piece in a way.
Mahdi Fleifel (MF): Everything leading up to making To a Land Unknown was my film school. That’s to say that when I was in actual film school, I felt lost most of the time, trying to figure out how to make work that interested and inspired me, things that felt like discoveries. It was only after finishing film school that I started film school, if you know what I mean. The carrot in front of me was to make this fiction feature. I feel in some ways that my first feature documentary was kind of made by accident. I went to the camp in Lebanon in 2000 to make something based on an exercise we had in film school called “landscape and character research”. I took my camera with me and felt I was doing the landscape and character research that would inspire a fictional work.
I kept returning to the camp with this exercise in mind and in 2010, after about six weeks there, I came home with about 130 hours of footage [laughing]. And so, what do you do with all that, right? How to navigate through all that? My initial thought was to put together a 20-minute teaser that could help finance the film I wanted to make. But during the editing journey of making that teaser, it just organically grew, leading me to discover other footage I had shot in the past along with footage my father had shot during our childhood, as well as other footage that other family members had filmed. It occurred to me that this felt like maybe what Abbas Kiarostami experienced when he made ABC Africa [2001]. He was commissioned to make a film about AIDS in Africa and he initially went to do research with his mini-DV camera. Upon returning with his footage, he thought about what he might make that could be more interesting or more effective. Those first impressions he shot turned out to be the film he made. That’s how I came to documentary. The film I wanted to make in the camp was the one I was already making in that first-person approach.
PC: One of the many beautiful things about your first film is that the camera feels so embodied. Even though we never really see you – except in your father’s footage as a little kid – you are also a character in the film and so is your camera. Somehow, I notice that when I watch films like this, I’m consistently moved by that convention, that embodied, breathing camera. You’re of that place, but you’re also, of course separate as the supposed objective observer.
MF: Absolutely. In my documentary work, everyone for the most part that appears in front of my camera are friends and family members so yes, there’s immediate intimacy. I always find the most interesting characters in the people closest to me, my grandfather, my childhood friend, my uncle. But, even when I’m filming them in this close, intimate way, the camera does change things. In other words, the camera is not an innocent presence. There’s always this unwritten contract, an acknowledgement that they’re being recorded. They’re very aware of that. Even when someone didn’t particularly want to be in front of the camera, there was always this playfulness or flirtation happening, a sort of dance with the camera. I often wonder, would my friend Abu Eyad have left the refugee camp at the end of that film had I not been there recording him, asking him questions, interrogating him in terms of what he wanted to do with his future? This form that I start to see reality through means that my grandfather is not just my grandfather anymore; he’s a man with his own dreams, hopes, fears, the ways in which he deals with his own trauma, the trauma of the Nakba. He’s a character like all the others in this universe that I’m also trying to navigate within.
PC: In terms of the characters we meet and re-meet throughout your work, whether they are “themselves” we can say, or in the guise of a fictional character, your friend, Reda is there – in the camp, in Greece. There are many iterations of this young man, including in To a Land Unknown. After a while, as well, I thought about him in the guise of your doppelgänger for want of a better word, you’re “what if” person. You and your family left the Middle East and became European, and part of your family did not, or could not. In A World Not Ours, at one point, your uncle tells you that he expected members of the family to help him leave the camp. I guess what I want to ask is, was there any anticipation or foreknowledge of just how bad things would continue to be for Palestinians, this entrapment of their lives, for generations now? Stateless, unemployable, non-entities, all these human lives wasted in this morass of apartheid? Reda somehow becomes a litmus of that very situation, a contemporary of yours whose life goes off the rails. And there you are observing and researching. What kinds of artistic imperatives did that circumstance reveal to you?
MF: Our own father was obsessed with filming. The camera was a very natural participant in our lives, always. But why am I the only family member obsessed with the camp, and with keeping a record of the camp, returning there over and over to document? This has been a question that’s been on my mind forever. Yes, as you’re pointing out, I was lucky in a way because one day my father decided that we had to leave the camp and go to Europe. I was nine years old, and I left this whole life behind, the only one I knew. As I grew older, I kept thinking about how much that place had influenced me. I would ask friends in Denmark or even in Beirut: You’ve not heard of Ain al-Hilweh? Have you not been to Ain al-Hilweh? That was a strange one for me. Initially, my audience was a group of classmates here in Denmark. I would invite them to our house and show them footage and it provided intrigue for them. They would ask me: What is a camp? What do you mean you were spending your summer holidays in the camp? Is it like a favela in Brazil? What do you mean a refugee camp? Only until I was older did I realize it was a tragedy. They’re referred to as refugees. But they’re really Nakba survivors. These are second and third generation Nakba survivors. The idea of being completely exiled by the world – forgotten. No one cares. What is that like? What would I do if I was in that situation? I was drawn to them. And they were also drawn to me.
In the case of Reda, I’d been making a film about Abu Eyad, my childhood friend, and Reda was the neighbour of my grandparents. He knew me as the guy always running around with the camera. He came to me one day to ask me why didn’t I make a film about him? All I saw was that he was surrounded by drug dealers who were coming to his house all the time. It wasn’t at all pretty and I didn’t think it was a good idea. So, he said, well, why don’t you just come and film my wedding? That was the beginning of filming with him. Out of that wedding shoot came the film A Man Returned, the first portrait I did with him. I saw many guys like Reda in Athens, the place where he picked up a drug habit, meaning hard drugs.
Later, one of my friends, the sociologist, Marie Kortam, introduced me to this study that she’d done around this idea of three logical exits and the film called 3 Logical Exits [2020] is the follow up to Reda’s story. Marie’s research told me that that is really all they have, these three means of escape. One, you join a political faction, or two, you become a drug dealer or an addict. The third is that you really do escape, leaving the camp to try your luck in finding the great El Dorado somewhere in Northern Europe. Some make it and some don’t. It’s a universal story. It’s “Lord of the Flies”; it’s “Of Mice and Men”. You find it in Ghassan Kanafani’s novella, “Men in the Sun” [1962]. I tapped into what already exists in these stories I’m mentioning. In cinema, inspirations were Midnight Cowboy [1969], Dog Day Afternoon [1975], and Héctor Babenco’s Pixote [1981].
PC: I was struck by that concept or notion of logic in the context of the Palestinian situation, this socio-political theory that proposes these systems of “logic”, convoluted explanations of why things must continue this way. In watching your films, I think you have a very special sense of how to explicate these ideas in myriad ways because in each of your short works, whether purposefully or not, you set yourself precise restrictions in the ways in which you’ll tell a different facet of that story, emphasizing the absurdity, the surreality. In your script for To a Land Unknown, much of this dovetails so beautifully in this fictional portrait of these two guys in this disorienting landscape in Athens they’re trying so hard to escape. Would you talk a bit about the evolution of the script?
MF: I was lucky, in this instance, to ultimately work with good writers, in particular, Fyzal Boulifa, a brilliant writer-director and a friend. I’ve been trying to make this film for twelve years. The story came out of A World Not Ours. I arrived in Athens, my first time ever in Greece. It was 2011 and it’s thanks to Abu Eyad that I was there because that’s where A World Not Ours basically ends. But a whole new world, also “not ours” if you will, begins as I stepped foot in Greece. I discover the lives of these young men in a purgatory. No one wanted to come to Greece to settle; it’s a gateway to Europe. They want to find ways to make it north. The first thing that came to my mind was Kanafani’s “Men in the Sun” – it’s essentially the same story, just decades later. In Kanafani’s world, El Dorado at the time was Kuwait and the men cross the border from Iraq into Kuwait and end up getting stuck in the desert. In the present day, it’s this urban desert called Athens.
Having already used a title from Kanafani in borrowing the phrase “a world not ours”, I thought, why not continue? The initial idea was a modern adaptation, in a sense. So, the working title became Men in the Sun. In these years leading up to 2016, I had made Xenos, 20 Handshakes for Peace, and A Man Returned. I was at the Berlinale with all of them. We premiered A Man Returned there in 2016, where Fuocoammare / Fire at Sea by Gianfranco Rosi wins the big prize. It was a sort of peak of refugee stories on film, an almost oversaturated landscape of both fiction and documentary refugee stories. In trying to finance this film, people would ask why the world needed another refugee story.
I’m a filmmaker in exile. Yes, I have a Danish passport and I’m European, but most of the funding bodies here in Europe asked me why they should spend their taxpayers’ money so I could go to Greece and make a film with non-actors in Arabic? Why would they fund that? So then with the team of producers working with me, we had to invent our own pathway. This film is as independent as it gets.
Over the course of a decade, I had documented four guys, one of which was Abu Eyad. He eventually made it to Berlin. He was there to present A World Not Ours at the Berlinale and then he just stayed there. We lost touch with the second guy; he disappeared in Hungary and then we stopped hearing from him. Until this day, I don’t know what happened to him. After we made A Man Returned and 3 Logical Exits, Reda – the third one – had left the camp one more time, went back to Athens in hopes of making it to Germany and in six months’ time, he had died of an overdose. It was really Reda’s death that resurrected the project, which, by then, I had put aside. With that event, I felt that I really had to continue to try to make To a Land Unknown. I insisted that this was not just another refugee story. There’s more to it than that.
Then there was the story of the fourth guy. He had managed to make it to the UK, a very tough place to arrive to from Greece. He contacted me and came and stayed with me for a weekend in London where I was living at the time. I asked him how he made it out. And he told me, in a calm, matter-of-fact way, that when he had crossed the Macedonian border with two other guys, they had twenty thousand euros on them but that they had left four Kurdish men bound and gagged in their basement flat in Athens. I video-recorded this story over the course of that weekend and couldn’t quite believe what I was listening to. I wondered if he was fabricating this story. It felt like a Trainspotting adventure or The Great Escape, some sort of crazy movie. But it’s a real story.
I was still stuck in the quagmire of documentary and couldn’t quite elevate the script to take on a fictional form, the film I really desired to make. I had all these ideas and references. I was lucky to reconnect with Fyzal. In 2013, we were both at La Résidence du Festival de Cannes. He had made two features in the meantime and when we re-met, I asked him if he would mind reading what I had at the time. He told me it wasn’t bad but that it wasn’t working all that well either. And I agreed. Working with him on the script was when I discovered what a really good screenwriter is. Out of necessity, I had been trying to write a fiction script. But Fyzal is a really good screenwriter, it’s all on the page. Fyzal knew my work, but he re-watched my documentary and read the transcript of the interview with the guy I recorded in London. In one of our conversations, I said to him that this was essentially George and Lenny from “Of Mice and Men”. And at that point, he just got it. No exaggeration, within a month, we wrote the shooting script.
PC: Going back to this idea of working with this diverse group of producers who helped you get this film done in various ways, how did those relationships serve you in particular in finally getting it produced, finished, out into the world?
MF: My long-time producing partner Patrick Campbell and I went our separate ways as I started production on the film. He and I set up Nakba FilmWorks together and he co-produced all the works leading up to the feature. What Patrick gave me throughout those years, as well as producer, Geoff Arbourne’s contribution towards To a Land Unknown, is the kind of producing work that doesn’t exist in the “official” system of getting films made. They are both outside-the-box thinkers, the classic “beg, steal and borrow” way of producing. I think a good producer must be a hustler, a magician of sorts. With Patrick, we’d get the odd grant here or there. But it was like sourdough starter. Whatever we made and whatever small amount it would earn, we would put into the next project, and the next, and the next. That’s how it worked both financially and creatively. Some characters kept coming back, and yes, they kept morphing until they became part of the fictional portraits of To a Land Unknown. Like you said in the beginning, it is a continuum, this body of work. What’s most exciting for me as an author is to surprise myself.
Let me put it this way: My least satisfying film creatively is A Drowning Man. It premiered at Cannes, traveled, won awards, etc. When I finished this fiction short though, I thought here’s a film that could have been made by many other directors, and probably made better. But in the case of, say, I Signed the Petition, or some of the other works, those were surprises even to me. I discovered the form it took along the way. Had those films been made with other more traditional producers or ones that are grounded in a system, these films would have been made in this classical way of writing: first a treatment, then applying for funds from the commissioning editor at some national film institute, Danish, British, etc. Then receiving comments, going back and re-writing, on and on.
PC: More times than not, films that are made in this way, especially documentary, are dead on arrival and you just explained some of the reasons why that is.
MF: Yeah, the likelihood of a work that’s been through that mill of standing out and not looking like every other film is high. That’s what happens. I see it here in Denmark. There’s the odd film that stands out, but most of them look and feel somewhat the same. Thanks to producers like Patrick and Geoff and a long collaboration with my editor, Michael Aaglund, that hasn’t been my experience. Mike supervised on To a Land Unknown, a film edited by Halim Sabbagh, another brilliant editor. Mike is the one consistent treasure, though, my film school compadre, if you will. We’ve worked together ever since. Editors, of course, in documentary are crucial since they are co-authors of the film.
PC: Considering this huge accomplishment of having this twelve-years-in-the-making film out in the world now, what feels like the next thing for you, if you can share anything about that? All the filmmakers that have inspired you, that you’ve mentioned here, tended to work in a genre-free zone naturally, no permission given to mix forms; they just did it, thereby creating a bespoke cinematic language of their own.
MF: I don’t watch much TV, but I just watched Adolescence on Netflix [mini-series, 2025]. It’s the talk of the town right now. What a brilliant show. An hour after finishing it, I couldn’t say a word; I couldn’t speak. Being on a platform like Netflix, the whole world is watching it; it generates a huge buzz. Looking at this independent film we made, of course there wasn’t that kind of muscle behind it that would really push it out there. In the case of Sean Baker’s Anora, a film that cost six million dollars to make, Neon put eighteen million into distributing and promoting it – three times the film’s budget. How do you compete with that? You don’t! The average person goes to the cinema twice a year to see a film and it’ll probably be something like Oppenheimer [2023], or something on that scale. Then what are the chances of that second movie being my film? It makes you question why you do this. Who will watch these films? It’s the great mystery of my life. You have to be sufficiently crazy to do this kind of work. There’s no rational answer as to why I spend all these years trying to make a film that people might watch if they happen to be at that festival on that particular day. But what else can I do? I’m a storyteller and this is all I know.
I am working on a couple of projects and have just been offered a fellowship for my next documentary. I can work outside this industry machinery I’ve been speaking about with a documentary much easier than I can with a fiction film. It’s more accessible to make a small, personal documentary. Godard once said that, whereas the genre of Israel was the epic – fantasy, legend, and myth – the genre of the Palestinians was the documentary – facts, law, and metrics. Mind you, Palestinian reality is stranger than fiction. [laughs]
PC: That’s in part why I believe that the work you’ve done thus far, and will continue to do, is so essential in this human, deeply personal, experiential way – continuing to tell your own story and that of the people you know, a continuum of an abiding and constant connection to your people.
MF: Thank you. It is a mysterious urge in me. A strange necessity to make these films. I feel like if I didn’t make them, then nobody will, so it feels urgent, but it takes so much energy to keep trying, to keep the momentum, to make something that might take three or four or even twelve years to make. Once we did all our prep for To a Land Unknown, had the script finalized, without even having all the financing in place, we shot and finished it for its Cannes premiere in just six and a half months. My doctor wouldn’t advise me to do this again, but for me, it works best this way. It’s the way the young Friedkin or Coppola made their films, with a gun to the head. I am at my most creative like that, to just bull through. Anyway, let’s see what else is in store.
Pamela Cohn is a Helsinki-based critic, writer, film & video curator, story structure consultant, and festival moderator. She’s the author of Lucid Dreaming: Conversations with 29 Filmmakers (OR Books, New York & London, 2020), and co-producer and host of The Lucid Dreaming Podcast: Conversations on Cinema, Art & Moving Image.
