Director hopes Netflix film ‘The Swimmers’ inspires dialogue about refugees

Female ambition is so often a dirty word, according to director Sally El Hosaini, who wanted to celebrate it with her film “The Swimmers,” which opened the Toronto International Film Festival in September.

The Netflix movie, which streams Wednesday, follows the remarkable true story of Syrian sisters Yusra and Sarah Mardini (played by sisters Nathalie and Manal Issa) who flee their war-torn home in Damascus and embark on a harrowing journey to Greece as refugees seeking asylum before Yusra competed at the 2016 Rio Olympics.

Welsh-Egyptian film director El Hosaini gets told frequently that she has ambitious ideas as a filmmaker, but that’s exactly why she didn’t hesitate to show Yusra’s and Sarah’s ambition: Sarah’s ambition to leave, and create a better life for herself and to survive the journey; Yusra’s to commit herself to swimming and make it to the Olympics like her heroes, no matter what.

“Those were things that I connected to personally, and I really wanted to make this film the film that I wish I had seen when I was 16 because I felt no film existed that captured these things. If I had seen that at 16, it would have had such a big impact on me,” she said in an interview.

El Hosaini, who also co-wrote the film with Jack Thorne, felt “honoured” to have it open at TIFF. “We really didn’t expect it. So it’s just been such a privilege to be celebrated in that way and to be given such an important platform.”

The film shines the light on modern, young women growing up in the Middle East and disrupts the stereotype we often see.

“This story resonated with me because Yusra and Sarah reminded me of myself when I was younger,” El Hosaini said. “Even though they were growing up in Damascus and I was growing up in Cairo, I saw the similarities in who we were, the liberal, modern, bilingual young women living in a capital in the Middle East … but you never see those young women in movies.

“That really excited me,” she continued. “Often there seems to be this view of the Middle East on our screens where everything’s beige. The storylines are often women who are very victimized or silenced, they’re often very religious, or there’s like these tragic storylines or plots. And in this, I just saw these ambitious young women who were really inspiring and both of them heroes in their own right.”

The universal bond of sisterhood is another theme that hit home for the director.

“I love the fact that there’s a very obvious kind of hero in Yusra. But then there’s the unsung hero in Sarah and there’s no difference between the heroism of either of them, whether you’re the one on the pedestal or the one who’s selflessly doing it. The fact that they were sisters, and that universal sibling relationship was at the heart of the beast, just elevated it for me.”

El Hosaini, who was born in Wales and raised in Egypt, also authentically captures what it was like for teenagers growing up during the Syrian war.

“So a lot of people have a certain perception of Middle Eastern young women; they don’t think that there are nightclubs. But during the Syrian war, there were more underground bars and clubs opening than any other time because people really needed a drink and they really needed to release the pressure of what they were living, because they were trying to carry on with normal life while there were kind of skirmishes around different parts of the city. So the teenage years of Yusra and Sarah involved them literally dancing in clubs, while mortars were falling down around them in other neighbourhoods.”

After El Hosaini showed the film to the Mardini sisters, Yusra thanked her for the inclusion of that scene saying, “That’s what it felt like to me as a teenager. We were here, the walls over there. But we were still young and free, having fun like teenagers do, no matter what.”

The 46-year-old filmmaker hopes the movie puts the refugee conversation back on the table.

“This is something that’s not going away now with climate change as well; people who will become refugees as a result of climate change and not just political reasons. I think that this is a global issue and so I would hope that people would remember that they’re just ordinary people like us and that that could be me. Nobody chooses to become a refugee. It’s something they find themselves in.”

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