At the Sundance premiere of One In A Million a few days ago, the documentary’s main subject, Isra’a, was in the audience. She is the young Syrian woman discovered by partners and filmmakers Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes on a street corner in Izmir, Turkey, in 2015 when she was eleven years old. The film (sold by Autlook outside the US) follows her over a decade of her life. Her family fled Aleppo as refugees, eventually making it to Germany.
“She was crying a little bit. She was laughing. I was watching her watching the film the whole time,” co-director Azzam, who is Syrian herself, says of her film’s main character’s response to the Park City screening. The Sundance audience gave her a standing ovation. “And she [Isra’a] loved the film as well.”
Critics have already compared the documentary to Richard Linklater’s Boyhood and Michael Apted’s Seven-Up series, both also projects shot over many years.
At the start of the movie, Isra’a is an effervescent kid with an obvious appetite for life that transcends her family’s grim circumstances as refugees. “When we first met them, we were working on a project about the refugee crisis in 2015 and we knew we wanted to find families, people who were travelling to Europe and trying to smuggle themselves [there].”
The filmmakers had their camera with them. They wanted to find participants who were about to journey to Europe. One problem was that everything was “moving so quickly.” People they tried to speak to would be setting off only hours or even minutes after meeting the two directors.
“We were trying to work out how we would find a character we could really get to know, who we could embed with, and we hit upon this idea of these people who were selling cigarettes, selling life-jackets, to pay their way. “
They found a boy they thought they could follow but co-director MacInnes went off to work on another assignment for a week. While he was away, Azzam called him to say, “forget about that boy. I’ve met the most amazing girl in the world.”
In one of Izmir’s main squares, where refugees and smugglers did many of their deals, she had spotted Isra’a for the first time. “She saw me. We smiled at each other and started talking. Instantly she wanted to be involved.”
The initial idea was to follow Isra’a until she was 18 and had “come of age.” The filmmakers knew they would need “a long period of time” to make meaningful observations about her experiences as a refugee.
“At the time, there was a lot of talk in the news about integration and whether these people can assimilate, whether they can be part of Europe. We thought the only way we can answer that question is to see how she is going to live her life in Germany,” Azzam recalls.
The filmmakers were in Germany trying to “wrap up” the documentary in December 2024 when the Assad regime in Syria toppled. They decided to keep on filming as Isra’a, who was now married and a mother, returned to her homeland. “That became the final chapter of the film. We feel it gives us this amazing book-end,” MacInnes says.
Backers for the project at the start were the BBC and PBS. There was a period when the two directors were keeping the project going “on our own credit card, heading out to Germany and filming them.”
The project was chosen for the IDFA Forum in 2020. That brought further momentum. Others behind the feature included Front line Features and Impact Partners.
Life for Isra’a’s family in Germany was full of upheavals. Her devoted father Tarek initially marvelled at the political freedom in the west (the fact that you could hold protests without being shot at) but became increasingly fretful as his authority as family patriarch began to erode.
“It’s really common for Syrian men who arrived in Germany to have this conflict because of the way they live their lives and the complete control they had over the families in Syria. They were shocked they couldn’t continue that.”
By contrast, Isra’a’s mother Nisreen welcomed her opportunity to live on her own terms, and not always to have to defer to a husband “trying to control her.”
Inevitably, the filmmakers found themselves in the middle as Tarek’s relationship with Nisreen began to fray. What may have started as a political documentary about refugees turned into more of a domestic drama.
“When we set out, we imagined the film being more of a dynamic between the family and the society they found themselves in, how much they would be welcomed in Germany and how much they would be encountering the far right….it was something we had to adjust to, that the tension in the story started to come from within the family,” says MacInnes.
Characters don’t always behave as you would expect. “Good people do bad things. People are morally complex. We don’t seek to sit in judgement. We just want to put it out there, the effects on a family of being transplanted into an alien culture and how that can tear them apart,” he adds.
MacInnes and Azzam themselves met in Syria in 2010. He was working as a director on an international history series. She was a producer.
“We got together and made an excellent decision to settle down and move in to Syria at the beginning of 2011,” he jokes about trying to put down roots just as the civil war was starting. They moved back to London when Azzam won a scholarship to study visual anthropology at Goldsmiths.
“We then moved back to London. We imagined we would go back to Syria, but that day never came.”
Azzam, who is from the Druze community in the south of Syria, was having a similar experience of displacement to that of her subjects. “I was also uprooted. I never planned to live in the UK,” she says.
Returning to Syria post-Assad was deeply emotional for them too. “Parts of Syria, say central Damascus which we knew so well, were almost exactly as we had left them…but you only had to drive yourself a couple of miles away to find yourself in total devastation,” MacInnes reflects grimly. “There was definitely a moment on the road to Aleppo where we thought what are we doing…is this too harrowing an experience. [But] in those situations, having the focus of making the film is helpful. You’re not dwelling on your own emotional experience…”
