“They can never give you something for yourself as a third-world country,” Aram Sabbah said to me over a Zoom interview. “It always has to look like something that the West did.”

The 27-year-old skateboarder from Palestine made his acting debut with the 2024 refugee thriller To a Land Unknown, a pulsating journey of Palestinian cousins Chatila (Mahmood Bakri) and Reda (Sabbah) as they seek a way out from their arduous refugee life by any means necessary.

Looking back at his acclaimed debut performance, Sabbah confessed that the opportunity came by chance, as Palestinian-Danish filmmaker Mahdi Fleifel had already eyed another actor to play Reda. But with the production limited to Greece, the actor couldn’t get a visa on time. Fleifel, who knew Sabbah from six to seven years earlier, rang him up three days before filming. The odds turned out to be in Sabbah’s favour.

To a Land Unknown has drawn rave reviews globally and comparisons with Hollywood classics like Midnight Cowboy (1969) and Dog Day Afternoon (1975). While Fleifel does cite American auteurs like Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma as inspirations, it’s easy to see why Western critics would use Midnight Cowboy as a yardstick of comparison. 

The 1969 counterculture hit follows a duo of social outcasts, Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and Ratzo Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), surviving in a wintry New York. Meanwhile, To a Land Unknown has Palestinian refugee cousins Chatila and Reda wandering through graffiti-covered neighbourhoods of Athens, gathering petty cash with dreams of escaping their state of perpetual displacement..

But for Sabbah, the critics need to go beyond film school analyses and dig deeper into the larger message. “The idea of doing a film like this is to raise awareness about what happened and what has been happening to the Palestinians struggling,” he said, “be it in their home, in Athens, and everywhere else.” 

A Palestinian Film Beyond Victimizing and Gun-Firing

Migration is a constant state of mind in To a Land Unknown. Stuck in Greece, Chatila hopes to resettle in Berlin, where he plans on starting an eating joint, with his wife as cook and younger cousin Reda as bartender. As Chatila’s wife and son are still stuck in a refugee camp in Lebanon, the street-smart protagonist and his moralistic cousin gather money through petty theft and, in Reda’s case, sex work with older men.

When they cross paths with Malik (Mohammad Alsurafa), a lost 13-year-old from Gaza, the cousins find a new goal. While Reda plans on reuniting the boy with his aunt in Italy out of humanitarian goodwill, Chatila orchestrates the operation as a money-making opportunity for his Berlin dreams. This results in a chaotic domino effect that draws in a veteran trafficker, pits refugees against refugees, and builds up to a tear-jerking finale.

And yet, To a Land Unknown doesn’t want you to just sob tears for Palestinian refugees. Fleifel’s lens doesn’t necessarily paint his heroes as pity-seeking saints. Chatila occasionally cheats on his encamped wife with a Greek woman, while Reda spirals down a cycle of drug abuse. Afraid of disappointing Chatila and his mother back home, Reda strives to kick the habit even as he spends his days in uncertainty.

For Sabbah, comparing his film and its broken characters with Midnight Cowboy is reductive. Instead, he stresses how To a Land Unknown is a Palestinian narrative like no other— one that gives its characters more agency than the average Palestinian stereotype.

“We’re always either a victim or we’re shooting AKs, you know?” he stated. “This story shows Palestinians in a different light. So, when we go outside, we have to work harder doing what we can to bring food to the table for the family.” In this sense, To a Land Unknown doubles as a tale of what Sabbah called “Palestinian strength” and “lost youth”.

Sabbah’s words ring true in a limited milieu of the Palestinian non-documentary features that broke out into the global mainstream, such as the Oscar-nominated Paradise Now (2005) which revolved around two Palestinian men recruited for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv, and the Netflix title Farha (2021), a Palestinian girl’s coming-of-age experience during the Nakba in 1948. Hollywood is often fixated on depicting Palestinians as armed agents of chaos, like in Munich (2005) and the recent Oscar nominee, September 5 (2025).

There is the occasional Palestinian cinema exception, like the romantic dramedy Gaza Mon Amour (2020) that tells the love story between a 60-year-old Gazan fisherman and a widow marketplace trader. Yet, in the face of this “victim-and-terrorist” binary, To a Land Unknown remains highly relevant, as it attempts to dig deeper into the average Palestinian immigrant’s condition. Reda possesses a more dreamy-eyed, idealistic view of life, in contrast to his cousin Chatila’s hardened, rational demeanor. They might yearn for the same Utopian life in Berlin, away from their turbulent homeland, but both characters are individualized with their own moral values and personal struggles.

The Futility of Film Festivals

Beyond the fetishising reviews, Sabbah also has a bone to pick with film festivals and how hollow they can feel. “It’s useless,” he bluntly replied when I brought up his Cannes debut. 

Sabbah recounted how he “snuck up” his keffiyeh to the red carpet, pairing the Palestinian scarf with his black-and-white formals. He was joined by the director and co-stars as the film premiered in the French festival’s Directors’ Fortnight section, garnering largely positive reactions from the critics and other attendees. But once the festivities ended, Sabbah had mixed feelings.

“Even before Cannes, I knew these film festivals wanted to be ‘neutral’ towards everyone,” Sabbah said. “This is a film space where everybody can participate, even the people who support the genocide in Gaza. Now, I’m not asking you to put the spotlight only on Palestinians and forget everyone else. But when I’m going to Cannes, I want to be sincere with my film, to showcase the truth and real life of the people I represent. When real life hits, it feels like you’re standing on the wrong side of history.”

His resentment of the West’s tokenistic appreciation also feels similar to the aftermath of the Best Documentary Oscar win for the Palestinian-Israeli venture No Other Land. When the documentary’s Israeli and Palestinian contingent of journalists and activists accepted their golden statuettes, Hollywood seemed to have had a vaguely redemptive moment. Western media headlines heralded the film as an Israeli-Palestinian co-production instead of emphasising the documentary’s focus on Israeli settler colonialism and ethnic cleansing.

But when No Other Land’s Palestinian co-director, Hamdan Ballal, was attacked by Israeli settlers and later detained by Israeli forces for a night, most A-listers kept mum. Two silence-filled days after the attack on Ballal, the Academy Awards issued an ominous statement that condemned “harming or suppressing artists for their work”. Still, they then defended the silence because “the Academy represents close to 11,000 global members with many unique viewpoints.” No mention of Ballal or the violence he was subjected to. 

Despite the awards glory and film festival acclaim, the present-day realities of Palestinian filmmakers and journalists can’t be glossed over. For instance, Palestinian photojournalist Fatma Hassouna lost her life to an Israeli airstrike this April, just weeks before a documentary on her (Sepideh Farsi’s Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk) was to premiere at Cannes. 

Searching for a Homeland in the Heart of Greece

Apart from kickstarting Sabbah’s acting journey, To a Land Unknown also marked Fleifel’s feature debut. His intense thriller is entirely set around the Greek capital city of Athens, a conscious choice that can be traced to his 2011 debut documentary, A World Not Ours. In an interview with Variety, the filmmaker explained how he followed one of his refugee subjects to Athens. The endeavor opened Fleifel’s eyes to young Palestinian refugees fleeing the camps in Lebanon and Syria and trying to rebuild a life in Europe.

Greece’s historical relations with Palestine go back to 1982 when Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) chairman Yasser Arafat was moved from Lebanon to Athens in Greek ships. Arafat’s migration directly resulted from Israel’s invasion of Lebanon to destroy the PLO. In the decades that followed, Greece remained a preferred destination for Palestinian refugees to seek asylum. 

As reported by Spanish newspaper El País, data from the United Nations Refugee Agency shows that Palestinians represent the third-largest refugee community in the Greek islands, accounting for 16% of registered refugees in 2023. Since October 7th, 2023, with Gaza’s borders closed off, the number of Palestinians in Greek refugee camps has gone down from October 2023 (2,621) to January 2024 (1,630). Despite such data, Dimitris Kairidis, the Greek Minister of Migration and Asylum, expressed fears that the ongoing genocide would increase immigration. 

While To a Land Unknown doesn’t explicitly reference the aftermath of October 7th or the bigger picture of refugee trends in its Greek setting, the memory of Chatila and Reda’s native land is omnipresent. The region’s shadow lingers in zoom-ins on a Palestine-shaped tattoo on Reda’s chest and another frame with a cloudy Arafat image in the background.

Poetry also conveys the nomadic resilience of its characters, with an Edward Said quote opening the film: “It’s sort of the fate of Palestinians, not to end up where they started, but somewhere unexpected and far away.” Later, the camera pans on drug-dealing poet Abu Love (Mouataz Alshaltouh), as he remembers the late Mahmoud Darwish. Love’s words pierce through the slithering trails of cigarette smoke, as he recites from Darwish’s seminal work In Praise of the High Shadow (1983), lines ranging from “What do you want? Sovereignty over ashes?” to “Climb with me, to return to the homeless soul its beginning.” 

Darwish wrote the poem in the wake of Israel’s siege of Lebanon in 1982, celebrating resistance to oppressive regimes while also questioning the limitations of nationalism and statehood. In the poem, he makes it clear that the ultimate cause is human liberty from state-sponsored persecution and oppression. The film’s poet similarly echoes Darwish, lamenting on the extremes that his fellow Palestinians like Chatila and Reda have to go through to win their liberty. 

Skateboarding from Ramallah to the Olympics Qualifiers

Hailing from the West Bank city of Ramallah, where he still resides, Sabbah has travelled across the globe not just with acting alone. Skateboarding is another pursuit that allows him to wave the Palestinian flag overseas. Sabbah first picked up the sport when he was around 13 or 14. 

Under Israeli occupation, Palestine is yet to host its own skating championships, even though it continues fostering hordes of young skateboarders picking up classic moves like heelflips and the “ollie” (jumping in the air without hands) initially from YouTube tutorials and now, also with the efforts of the nonprofit SkatePal.

The story of SkatePal goes back to 2006 when Scotsman Charlie Davis migrated from Edinburgh to Palestine, volunteering as an English teacher and skating after class. With the local kids amused by his gravity-defying theatrics, Davis began teaching them a few tricks. Since then, Davis has immersed himself in Palestine’s nascent but thriving skateboarding scene, even setting up the country’s first mini-ramp at a Ramallah youth centre in 2013. That’s when he crossed paths with a teenage Sabbah, one of the region’s first-ever skateboarders.

“It sounds cliché,” Sabbah said, “but the thing about skateboarding in Palestine is just how free you feel on the board, and how connected you feel to the world. You will just be on a piece of wood, and you will feel like you’re a part of a big family.”

Sabbah’s early journey with the board is fleshed out in the 2015 short documentary Epicly Palestine’d. The film offers a glimpse of an adolescence rooted in getting skateboards from cousins outside Palestine, “landing the perfect trick”, and surviving in the midst of it all. A particularly sombre moment covers how Israeli forces fired a bullet in Sabbah’s leg during a protest at the Qalandia checkpoint. When rushed into an ambulance, a younger Sabbah recounted, “I was really frustrated that I got shot in the leg. If I was shot in the arm, maybe I could skate.”

With time, Sabbah did skate. At first, he needed some crutches, but he regained his usual speed. Fast forward to 2019, and Sabbah has been serving as SkatePal’s local manager in Palestine. The organization continues supporting young skateboarders in Gaza and the West Bank, even as Sabbah takes time for his personal ambitions.

More recently, he was spotted skating in Dubai for the 2024 Olympics qualifiers in Paris. Wearing a black t-shirt reading “Palestine” in red letters and wrapping a keffiyeh around his neck, Sabbah’s presence was unabashedly political. But again, like his Cannes stint, it was a mentally tough undertaking to represent his country.

“The UAE, Dubai, they’re not really standing up for us,” Sabbah said. “So, with the genocide happening in Gaza, being there was a dystopian feeling. Still, I had the chance to put the Palestinian flag on WorldSkate [the international body that governs skateboarding], and I was on the screens. It felt like I’d achieved something that wasn’t achieved before. And it set a goal for other kids to also achieve this, to have a higher score, and train for such tournaments.”

An Acting Debut Rooted in Childhood Dreams

Skateboarding also appeared in Sabbah’s riveting acting debut. From the opening scene to the poster of To a Land Unknown, the melancholic Reda can be occasionally spotted with a worn-out board by his side. When he befriends the Gazan boy, Malik, he also tries teaching him a few moves. This was more than just a mere coincidence.

It was director Mahdi Fleifel’s idea to turn Reda into a skateboarder even though Sabbah had some initial concerns. He didn’t want the character to be associated with his real-life persona. Eventually, Sabbah didn’t just incorporate Fleifel’s suggestions, but he also wished Reda had more time on the wheels.

“We couldn’t get more skateboarding clips because we were filming on film. That’s expensive.” A production funded by eight countries, To a Land Unknown was risky, with Fleifel’s preferred medium to shoot being 16mm film. 

Even with the few skateboarding scenes that made the final cut, Sabbah could shine in his own right as a full-fledged actor. 

Sabbah had always dreamt of performing on the big screen. “If you ask my parents, I always liked acting as a child,” he shared. “I used to play my grandparents, this cousin, that cousin.” So, when he bagged a scholarship to study in Tunisia, his first choice was to study theatre. Alas, the course was in French, and he had to settle for an English-language option like film editing.

With all the acclaim garnered by To a Land Unknown, Sabbah continues harbouring hopes to further his second career. And yet, his hunger to grow comes with some self-awareness.

“I do want to chase acting,” Sabbah said, “but also, there are people who do this for a living… So, it’s hard to just skate and wait for a role. I’ll still chase it whenever I have the opportunity to do it…and just do it.”

Hearing Sabbah passionately speak about his two interests-turned-careers, it’s tempting to quiz him about his first preference. “Skateboarding is my life and has given me multiple opportunities,” he said. But, smiling, he added, “My first love was acting, man.”

Back home at Ramallah, Sabbah must carry forward SkatePal’s vision of encouraging a new generation of skateboarders despite the bombings, air raids, and military violence. “We’ve already pushed for a way where people don’t have to start over from nothing,” he said. “There’s already a base for them to kick off whatever they want to do.”

Compared to when Sabbah picked up the board, some infrastructural challenges remain unchanged. For starters, Palestine still has no skate shops, and aspiring skaters have to acquire boards from neighboring countries like Jordan. Or sometimes, a cousin from the US. The skateparks for practicing are also limited, even as SkatePal actively tries to set up more parks and provide more boards to aspiring skaters.

Right now, Sabbah might not have achieved the core skateboarding scene he desires, but he remains proud that the sport is turning into a communal activity in Palestine. Families are flocking in to watch skateboarding like it’s a football match.

Ultimately, what matters to the SkatePal manager is the resilience of the youngsters pursuing the sport within military checkpoints they pass through just to reach a skatepark. This doesn’t just birth a skateboarding culture but also a community.

Despite the limitations, Sabbah puts his faith in a “pure, authentic Palestinian skateboarding scene.” When asked what this entails, Sabbah drew comparisons with the conventional picture of the average American skater boy. “There’s the culture of skating as ‘trash and destroy’, beers and alcohol, getting in the streets and graffiti, and all this,” he said. “We don’t have this. We just skate.”