Shot compassionately and astutely over a 10-year period, One In a Million charts the course of a young life as an 11-year girl escapes Syria to make the long journey to Germany with her family, frightened but also excited about her new future. It is a story of family and exile, and of hope and change.
Young Isra’a may be a charming and delightful person to take this challenging journey alongside, full of warmth and energy and brimming with love for her parents, but directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes don’t shy away from presenting the challenges and cultural issues that she and her refugee family face as they are transplanted from Syria to Germany.
The film opens with Isra’a returning to Aleppo in 2025 after the fall of the Assad regime to revisit the place she once called home. It quickly switches back 10 years to 2015, introducing Isra’a (not yet a teenage and selling cigarettes on the streets of Izmir in Turkey) and her family, and also dwells on how Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes began to engage closely with them.
Isra’a is full of excited enthusiasm for what her future might be. Her father Tarek is more than aware that he is “gambling with the lives of my children,” though her mother Nisreen is unsure that the family should have left Aleppo.
With Azzam and Macinnes embedded within the family, they head across the sea to the Greek island of Samos, passing through Serbia and Austria before arriving in Germany. The film follows the family as they adjust to a new life in exile and follows a young woman as her blossoming life adjusts to her new surroundings.
Learning German, making new friends, playing football and wearing make-up, her life is so very different from what it would have been in Syria. Mother Nisreen seems to relish her new way of living, but for Tarek there may be new options in life but he struggles to deal with the cultural shift in his family. He loses both a sense of tradition and the ‘control’ over Isra’a that he feels he would have had in Aleppo. All this is set against the backdrop of a p[oliticaly-evolving Germany and a toughening in attitude to refugees.
For Isra’a, the 10 years mark a complete change of direction in her young life, but while her surroundings may have changed she is still driven by hopes and dreams. One in a Million is a thoughtful and engaging film with a real sense of heart, with Azzam and Macinnes immersing themselves in the life of an ordinary family to detail what can materialise under the most extraordinary of circumstances.
UK-Germany, 2026, 103mins
Dirs: Itab Azzam, Jack MacInnes
Production: Keo Films, Frontline Features, BBC Storyville
International sales: Autlook Filmsales
Producers: Raney Aronson-Rath, Will Anderson, James Bluemel, Andrew Palmer
Cinematography: Itab Azzam, Jack MacInnes, Will Pugh
Editors: Alec Rossiter, Iain Pettifer
Music: Simon Russell
