There is no future

TV Se­ries

Un­known is a re­al­is­tic thriller from Is­rael that causes more angst and pain than the stan­dard TV se­ries that are meant to be “scary”. Di­rected and writ­ten by Taw­fik Abu Wael, it goes into mar­ginal sub­urbs to show us the daily life of a group of trou­bled young peo­ple and how their fu­ture ex­pec­ta­tions get com­pli­cated when a rape oc­curs near their high school. The se­ries is set in the real in­dus­trial city of Beit Shemesh, lo­cated be­tween Jerusalem and Tel-Aviv, which has a pop­u­la­tion of about 60,000 in­hab­i­tants, who are mostly poor and very re­li­gious.

It was pre­sented at Cannes in 2021 and this year it reached the Filmin cat­a­logue after be­com­ing a hit in Is­rael. Abu Wael is the di­rec­tor of an­other cult se­ries from 2019: Our Boys, an un­com­fort­able and ab­sorb­ing por­trait of in­tol­er­ance, re­venge and vi­o­lence be­tween Jews and Mus­lims, based on true events. With this new se­ries he has made a thriller in which the crime el­e­ment is the least im­por­tant, be­cause what he does with great styl­is­tic pre­ci­sion is delve into very cur­rent prob­lems in Is­raeli so­ci­ety: the dif­fer­ence in so­cial classes, poverty and mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion that have de­stroyed the fu­tures of many young peo­ple, dis­crim­i­na­tion, racism, po­lice vi­o­lence, ho­mo­pho­bia, fun­da­men­tal­ism, drugs, and so on.

The story be­gins when a group of boys who at­tend a spe­cial high school for so­cially vul­ner­a­ble teenagers im­me­di­ately be­come sus­pects in the rape of a young girl on a nearby cam­pus. The in­ves­ti­ga­tion is car­ried out by Avner, an ex­pe­ri­enced and tough po­lice of­fi­cer who hap­pens to be the hus­band of one the boys’ teach­ers, Naomi, a sen­si­tive woman with her own trau­mas who re­ally cares about her stu­dents’ well-being. Need­less to say, all of this will cause prob­lems for the cou­ple, who are ex­pect­ing their first child. As the episodes progress, the viewer gets to know the dy­nam­ics that are es­tab­lished be­tween the boys, es­pe­cially when one of them is ar­rested as the main sus­pect.

This young man, Vasa, is a falasha, the name given to Jews of Ethiopian ori­gin who were brought to the coun­try by the Is­raeli gov­ern­ment in the 1980s and 1990s to save them from star­va­tion, and who in prac­tice have ended up as some of so­ci­ety’s most dis­crim­i­nated and for­got­ten groups. Until his ar­rest, Vasa was one of the young peo­ple who had the most op­por­tu­ni­ties to get out of poverty be­cause of his tal­ent for music. At the same time, Naomi and Yaniv (a busi­ness­man who is forced to do so­cial ser­vice at the cen­tre) will try to help the rest of the boys, who grav­i­tate around two strong char­ac­ters: the spry Osher, who only wants to leave the neigh­bour­hood and makes every ef­fort to clear his record and en­list in the army, and Men­achem, prob­a­bly the most com­plex char­ac­ter, a smart and ag­gres­sive brat who acts with the cyn­i­cism of some­one who no longer has any­thing to lose, be­cause in re­al­ity he never had any­thing to gain.