Photo caption: Mohammed Ghassan (right) in TO A LAND UNKNOWN. Courtesy of Watermelon Pictures.
The searing thriller To a Land Unknown takes us to Athens, into the underground world of Palestinian migrants stuck until they acquire false passports that will get them into Germany. Yasser (Mohammed Ghassan) is a decent family man forced into low level criminality to survive and raise money for the forged passport; he is also burdened by responsibility for his cousin, whose drug addiction is a ticking bomb. Repeatedly exploited and defrauded, Yasser conceives of one very risky way out – to scam the very human traffickers preying on him.
Ghassan is excellent, as is Angeliki Papoulis as a fun-loving but clear-eyed Greek woman also living in the margins.
To a Land Unknown is the gripping first feature for Dubai-born Mahdi Fleifel, who works between Britain, Denmark and Greece.
I screened To a Land Unknown for the Nashville Film Festival and recommended it in my Under the radar at Nashville. After a brief arthouse run, To a Land Unknown is streamable from Amazon, AppleTV and YouTube.
Photo caption: Mohammed Ghassan (right) in TO A LAND UNKNOWN. Courtesy of Watermelon Pictures.
The searing thriller To a Land Unknown takes us to Athens, into the underground world of Palestinian migrants stuck until they acquire false passports that will get them into Germany. Yasser (Mohammed Ghassan) is a decent family man forced into low level criminality to survive and raise money for the forged passport; he is also burdened by responsibility for his cousin, whose drug addiction is a ticking bomb. Repeatedly exploited and defrauded, Yasser conceives of one very risky way out – to scam the very human traffickers preying on him.
Ghassan is excellent, as is Angeliki Papoulis as a fun-loving but clear-eyed Greek woman also living in the margins.
To a Land Unknown is the gripping first feature for Dubai-born Mahdi Fleifel, who works between Britain, Denmark and Greece.
I screened To a Land Unknown for the Nashville Film Festival and recommended it in my Under the radar at Nashville. To a Land Unknown is now in arthouse theaters, including the Laemmle Royal, Town Center 5 and Glendale.
Photo caption: Mia McKenna-Bruce in HOW TO HAVE SEX. Courtesy of MUBI.
In the searingly realistic How to Have Sex, three British teen girls glamorize a holiday week of binge drinking, clubbing and casual sex, so they head for the beach town of Malia on the island of Crete. Malia’s hotel and bar scene caters to British teenagers, producing a kind of a Cabo San Lucas/Daytona Beach/South Padre Island spring break culture with a lot less restraint. In Britain, kids can move on from high school at age sixteen, so this is like American Spring Break with a heavy dose of sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in the mix.
All three are gung ho on partying, but the lone virgin, Tara (Mia McKenna-Bruce), has the additional goal of her first sexual experience. Obviously, if a sixteen-year-old girl is determined to get as drunk as possible and lose her virginity in an unsupervised party frenzy with hundreds of drunk teenage boys, her quest can go painfully wrong in many easily imaginable ways. Hence, the joyous exuberance of the girls’ partying, is underpinned by the audience’s escalating sense of dread.
The three besties immediately self-intoxicate, meet some guys in their hotel and party essentially non-stop, cycling between poolside, beach and disco, stopping only to pass out. Rinse and repeat. How to Have Sex narrows its focus on Tara’s experience, which becomes more fraught, more emotionally isolated and devastating.
In her first feature, writer-Director Molly Manning Walker achieves remarkable verisimilitude in the weeklong party rampage, so much so that Mick LaSalle wrote, “The great strength and slight weakness of “How to Have Sex” is that it’s just like being there — except you might not want to be there.”
Anchoring herself in authenticity, Manning Walker is comfortable with ambiguity, whether in the relationships between the girlfriends or their attitudes, behaviors and feelings. She has not made a message picture, a political screed or a cautionary tale, but her audiences certainly notices organized beach games that are premised on females as sex objects and circumstances that beg the question of what constitutes acceptable consent.
The performance of Mia McKenna-Bruce as Tara is astonishingly raw, nuanced, heartbreaking and hopeful. Other critics describe it as “star-making”, which will depend on her getting material this good in the future.
The actresses playing Tara’s friends, Lara Peake and Enva Lewis, are also very, very good.
(Manning Walker was the cinematographer for Scrapper, another debut coming of age film by a female British writer-director, Charlotte Regan).
How to Have Sex is an impressive directorial debut for Molly Manning Walker, who is not afraid to make her audience uncomfortable. This is a movie more to be admired than enjoyed. How to Have Sex is streaming on MUBI.
