Where To?

Berlinale’s Perspectives section introduces , Where To?, Israeli filmmaker Assaf Machnes’ feature debut, following Hassan, a Palestinian taxi-app driver in Berlin whose nights become a revolving door of strangers, languages, and projected anxieties. When Israeli passenger Amir (Ido Tako) begins to reappear, their recurring rides over roughly two years, between 2022 and 2024, take on the shape of a relationship, part companionship, part test of what the city can absorb and what it forces people to translate.

In 2026, and in the long shadow that October 7 and its aftermath cast over any story staging intimacy across this divide, a question settles in early and refuses to leave. What does this drama choose to confront, and what does it keep outside its already constricted 4:3 frame? The script repeatedly reaches for the language of balance, offering calibrated vulnerability and softly “human” exchanges, then hesitating at the edge of discomfort. The politics here are those of reassurance. At a moment that punishes neutrality, Where To? keeps mistaking centrist posture for moral courage.

The Israeli filmmaker writes Hassan as a “model” Palestinian, patient, tactful, emotionally literate, always ready to translate himself into the kind of person the back seat can safely absorb. Ehab Salami plays him with real gravity and quiet intelligence, but the writing keeps sanding down the character into something exemplary rather than contradictory. Amir’s queerness becomes a narrative solvent, turning the central tension into a shared marginality, as if mutual pain were enough to flatten asymmetry. The result is not complexity so much as design, a Palestinian figure made maximally legible within a European liberal frame.

When the story reaches for humour, the mechanism becomes even clearer. A pick-up with an older Israeli couple plays like a sketch: suspicion flickers at the sight of a crocheted Palestinian flag, directions become a soft interrogation, Hebrew and Arabic hang in the car as signals. Hassan’s cousin, overhearing Hebrew on the phone, drops loaded Arabic phrases to mess with them, treating the vocabulary of fear as a prank. The scene wants to puncture prejudice, but it does so with the cheapest tool available, converting structural anxiety into a misunderstanding routine. Tension is introduced only to be diffused, then cashed out as proof of common humanity.

Berlin’s nocturnal drift gives the drama a melancholy rhythm. Hassan moves through the city like a modern Charon, ferrying lives across illuminated canals of Acheron, listening more than speaking, watching others arrive and depart. Yet even this image remains suspended above the harder terrain. The narrative gestures towards the events that led him to leave his homeland 30 years earlier, but the past stays largely atmospheric, folded into generalised sorrow rather than treated as history with teeth.

Salami supplies the texture the writing withholds, but the film keeps choosing equilibrium over consequence. Its politics are not offensive so much as evacuated, a set of careful gestures arranged to survive the room. In the end, Where To? does not so much bridge a divide as upholster it.

Reviewed on: 22 Feb 2026