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By the time we meet them, Chatila and Reda already are down in the lower depths. Cousins from Palestine, they have spent much of their lives living as refugees on the run. Having made it as far as Athens, a kind of holding zone for people from the Middle East trying to slip into Europe, they are trying to scrape together money to get to Germany.

Ferrety Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) is masterminding the cousins’ next fundraising operation in one of Athens’s pleasantly proletarian parks, directing his sweet-faced cousin Reda (Aram Sabbah) to fall over on his skateboard in front of a middle-aged woman who almost certainly will help him. Chatila’s job is to snatch her handbag and run. It’s mean, it’s shabby, and it’s miserably cheap. Their mark’s purse contains 5 euros, the price of a couple of coffees. They won’t be able to...

The brilliant Palestinian-Danish documentarian Mahdi Fleifel (“A World Not Ours”) leaps successfully into fiction with a feature debut that borrows a narrative container from “Midnight Cowboy” and a tormented soul that is all Palestinian.

The film opens with a quote from the celebrated Palestinian scholar, Edward Said: “In a way, it’s a sort of fate of Palestinians not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away.” These words have been cutting since the moment they were first spoken years ago, but released into the world now during the horrific genocide in Gaza, they have an extra, desperate bite, as another generation is forced to seek displacement as the only alternative to violent death. Premiering at Cannes in this climate, Fleifel’s portrait of two individual characters asks questions that cannot be confined to the screen. Where do you belong after you have been driven from your homeland?...

The tragic predicament of the Palestinians and what they’re now being subjected to begs to be analyzed and dissected, with various areas of dubious historical consensus put to new scrutiny; in Mahdi Fleifel’s fiction debut To a Land Unknown, we’re solely in a disorienting present tense, where there’s seldom time to think and reflect, only to agitate for survival.

The director himself was raised in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, a background echoed in the film’s key characters, before he settled in Denmark and studied in the UK; thus, he’s never lived under direct contact with the Israeli occupation. Acclaimed docs followed, most notably I Signed the Petition, a 10-minute short that went semi-viral, concerning the calls to boycott Radiohead’s 2017 concert in Tel Aviv. Evidenced by To a Land Unknown, his move to fiction is quite seamless, if always abetted by the...

Exclusive: Dubai-based management and production company 75East has signed Palestinian director Mahdi Fleifel, whose narrative feature debut To A Land Unknown is playing in Directors’ Fortnight this year.

75East, was launched last December by former Mister Smith sales executive Antone Saliba under the banner Untamed Talent with a focus on the Swana region (South West Asia and North Africa), and has recently rebranded.

The only Palestinian feature in Cannes this year, To A Land Unknown tells the story of the desperate attempts of two Palestinian cousins stranded in Athens to find a way to reach Germany.

Chatila and Reda are saving to pay for fake passports to get out of Athens. When Reda loses their hard-earned cash to his drug addiction, Chatila hatches an extreme plan, which involves them posing as smugglers and taking hostages in an effort to get him and his best friend out of their hopeless environment before it is too late.

MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace quite literally threw out her prepared script on Friday on-air while covering breaking news about a new public attack from former president Donald Trump. The visibly angry anchor told a panel of guests that “it’s time to do something different” when speaking about Trump’s outrageous and sometimes dangerous actions on and offline.

Wallace picked up her news script and tossed it to her right as she explained, “I have come on the air with breaking news about requests for gag orders because of threats for judges and their kids more times than I can count today before I got ready.”

After she apologized to the person who “has to write the banner at the bottom of my show,” Wallace added, “Donald Trump broke the rule of law. We should cover a broken judiciary in this country. Donald Trump managed to delay every federal, criminal...