Manal and Nathalie Issa in The Swimmers. Image courtesy Netflix
MA15+, 135 minutes
3 Stars
Review by © Jane Freebury
There must be 5.7 million chapters to the refugee story that has come out of Syria since 2011, one for each person. This is one, or rather, two of them. This film by a young Egyptian-Welsh director is based on the biographies of two real-life teenage sisters who, with parental support, left in search of a new life as their homeland descended into civil war.
Damascus to Berlin by air and sea but mainly on foot, it was a remarkable odyssey for Sara and Yusra Mardini in 2016. They are played by Lebanese sister actors, Manal and Nathalie Issa, with the former as the more rebellious sister who wears a nose ring. As the daughters of a swim coach the girls were, unsurprisingly, competition swimmers.
Early scenes of their lives growing up in Damascus look indistinguishable from the lives of affluent teenagers in the West, with plenty of freedom and no discernible restrictions on dress. Even more surprising was their flexibility in speaking English. At first, I feared the film was dubbed but now know that English is taught in schools from a very early age, earlier than French, and spoken widely in Syria.
Flipping between Arabic and English seems as easy as ABC
It’s intriguing that the advice offered by their swim coach dad, Ezzat (Ali Suliman), is to find their own lane and swim their own race. The words could have come straight out of the recent film King Richard, in which Will Smith’s tennis coach dad gives advice to his own daughters, those doyens of the tennis world, Venus and Serena Williams.
Hostilities begin in the distance across the city, at first disturbing however necessary to live with. But when a bomb arrives through the roof during a swimming competition, Ezzat and his family decide to take action, by sponsoring the two girls to make their way into Europe and eventually Berlin. A male cousin, Nizar (Ahmed Malek), would accompany them. There were in reality two male cousins who accompanied the sisters.
The trio flew to Turkey, made contact with people smugglers in Istanbul and embarked at Izmir on a small boat with outboard, bound for Greece. They soon discover that despite being issued with life jackets for the crossing, their inflatable craft is only supposed to carry up to 7 passengers. Moreover, it is covered in patch repairs and unseaworthy. People smugglers have so much to answer for.
The sisters and 18 other refugees will be in grave danger, but they embark. The sequences where the boat takes water in darkness are very effective and genuinely harrowing. The passengers begin tossing their belongings overboard to stay afloat. Sara tosses her swimming medals into the sea, too.
Nathalie Issa in The Swimmers. Image courtesy Netflix
Sara, Yusra and two others elect to swim to improve the boat’s chances of reaching land. As day dawns, all the boat passengers find they have indeed reached in Lesbos, and are in Europe. Now Sara and Yusra will need to get to Berlin, their ultimate goal.
In its way, writer-director Sally El Hosaini’s film is a tribute to the bravery, determination, and desperation of the millions of refugees around the world who search for a new life. Her screenplay, a collaboration with writer-producer Jack Thorne, covers a lot of ground, from life in Syria to the perilous journey to Europe, then across it, and to Rio where butterfly swimmer Sara competes as a member of the Refugee Olympic Team.
Along the way, there are scenes where too little is happening to warrant inclusion
Although it’s important to share the full experience of displaced people, The Swimmers would have done better conflating some of the episodes, giving the odyssey a crisp edit.
Some tonal shifts are disconcerting and surreal, as the mood changes quickly from teen romp to terror. It likely was like that at times, such as partying with friends on the terrace while in the distance Damascus was going up in smoke.
The screen chemistry between the real-life actor sisters is very engaging, and the young men, Nizar and Emad (James Krishna Floyd), who are their guardians along the way, are winning characters too. While this story of how a family became refugees is topical and heart-felt, it is also uplifting, even while the ongoing backstory of displaced people the world over isn’t.
Jane’s reviews are published on Rotten Tomatoes. First published in the Canberra Times on 29 December 2022.