Three journeys by Europeans who don’t know each other are interwoven by Finkiel in his Nowhere Promised Land. Without them realising, their lives intersect briefly. A group of Kurdish refugees, including a father and son, who hope to continue their journey through Hungary to the United Kingdom, but whose truck gets stranded in Budapest. A young female student travelling alone to various cities, trying without success to contact a friend, and on her way, filming homeless people with her camera. A young manager who is coordinating the move of a refrigerator factory from France to Hungary and who occasionally has his doubts about the social legitimacy of his work. Finkiel doesn’t explain much and there’s hardly any dialogue. The travel fragments unfold en passant, as if we zoom in by chance on the vicissitudes of a random selection of Europeans looking for more happiness. But in his half documentary, half fictional epic, Finkiel introduces subtle shifts in the experiences of his migrants. While their social economic points of departure are very different, one wonders for whom the journey will work out best in the end. Nowhere Promised Land looks as if it is made from a distance, but paradoxically enough this apparent objectivity focuses on personal isolation in Europe today.
