‘Where To?’ Berlinale Review: A Palestinian Driver and an Israeli Passenger Share the Ride

Hassan is a Palestinian taxi driver who has been living in Berlin for many years, working the night shift in a city he now knows by heart. His car operates through an app, and his nightly routine includes countless young people hopping from party to party, plenty of nocturnal madness, and even the occasional sexual encounter unfolding in the back seat—things he endures in silence from behind the wheel. One might assume him to be a more traditional, conservative figure, but Hassan (Ehab Salami) never complains when a gay couple kisses—or does more—right in front of him, nor when passengers make ridiculous requests or show up in absurd outfits. He also offers no commentary when his riders happen to be Israeli, even though he understands part of what they’re saying when they sit in the back and notice the Palestinian flag hanging from his rearview mirror.

All of this, it should be noted, takes place in 2022, before the escalation of the conflict that began in October 2023. In fact, one of his recurring passengers is an Israeli young man named Amir (Ido Tako), who has moved to Berlin and is freely exploring his sexuality, far from the repressive gaze of his home and family. Gradually—and with hardly any explicit mention of the tensions between their countries—the two become regular travel companions, meeting in the car every couple of months and catching up on their lives. Mostly Amir’s, since Hassan rarely talks about his own.

What we do learn about Hassan is revealed in fragments: he left the refugee camp where he lived with his family years ago, arrived alone in Germany, got married, and had three daughters. The most visible conflict in his present life, as we follow him through Berlin’s nights, involves his eldest daughter, with whom he has a complicated relationship. She is dating—and planning to marry—a German man. Yet Hassan holds everything in, never fully expressing himself. So much so that it soon becomes clear that he carries deeper wounds and unresolved pain, which only slowly surface when Amir’s romantic troubles trigger memories of Hassan’s own past.

Beyond these specific details, Where To? seeks to portray the closeness that can emerge when two people from countries at war meet and talk about their lives without constantly foregrounding national conflict. Despite obvious differences in age, background, taste, and experience, Hassan and Amir were born not far from one another, share a broader cultural universe, and suffer over surprisingly similar things. At some point in this episodic film—structured around scenes that jump forward by several months at a time—the timeline reaches October 2023. It is then that the most significant moments between them occur, even though what they are dealing with has little directly to do with the conflict itself.

Where To?—a somewhat curious title for a film about an Uber driver, since the destination is already set by the app—is a sensitive, well-meaning human drama that aims to show how personal empathy and the recognition of universal experiences—romantic and family problems, above all—can bring together people who, at least according to the news, are supposed to be enemies. “It’s a problem for me to get along with you,” Hassan tells Amir at one point, though Amir doesn’t seem particularly invested in such concerns. Still, Hassan neither avoids nor questions him. He understands that the young man is as fragile and defenseless as he himself was when he first arrived in Berlin, and he can’t help but identify with Amir’s circumstances, mood, and pain.

The film may feel somewhat naïve in its approach, perhaps overly focused on the emotional lives of its two characters—in that sense, it’s almost an anti–Taxi Driver. Yet despite this faint aura of artificiality, it’s hard not to feel empathy for these two lost, confused souls searching for answers in the streets of a blurry Berlin, seen only through windows like a distant and indistinct ghost—a place that seems to belong to others. At heart, they are two foreigners suspended in a kind of prolonged geographic and emotional limbo.

Machnes shows little interest in portraying the city itself. Berlin could just as easily be any other place; the film might have been shot elsewhere, or even on sets with rear projection, and very little would change. Aside from one scene in which Hassan visits a house and has a long conversation with a man connected to his past, almost everything unfolds inside the car or on nearby sidewalks and streets. What remains, in the end, is the illusion that within this four-wheeled microcosm, shared by just a handful of people, things might be slightly better than they are outside.