Entertainment

“Everybody really wanted this story to be told” – The Hollywood Reporter

There is a scene in Sally El-Hosaini’s Swimmers it was so stressful that it pushed some of the cast to the point of halting production. Some are sick. “When you see the actors vomiting [in the film]they are literally vomiting,” the director stated.

The scene in question is the hardest and most difficult to watch of the TIFF drag. But that’s the most important part of the whole movie. And the reason it exists.

Based on very tragic life events, the Working Title/Netflix feature ranked the incredible story of Yusra and Sara Mardini, two teenage Syrian sisters who fled Damascus in 2015 as the civil war broke out. Cruel war began to approach their home. After arriving in Turkey, desperate to cross the Aegean Sea to the Greek island of Lesbos, they paid smugglers to board a dangerously overcrowded boat with 18 refugees.

Halfway through the water, the engine stopped and the boat started to refuel, at which point the girls – both of whom had swam for their country – bravely jumped overboard with two others and swam more than three now to the other side while towing the boat with them. Everyone survived.

To shoot the scene, El-Hosaini, who co-wrote the screenplay with Jack Thorne, not only used real-life mobile footage from the danger – and, sadly, famously deadly – overcoming, but also actually put some refugees who made it on the water.

“It was emotional,” she noted. “But people really want this story to be told and for it to reach people. Because my biggest ambition and the reason for this level of realism is because I want the audience to feel like they are on this journey with the characters.”

But it’s not just for the audience. A Syrian family – currently living in Turkey – did not make the border crossing but still wanted to participate in the filming (scene in Turkey). “Parents feel it’s really important for their three children to experience it and understand what so many other members of their extended family and friends have had to,” says El-Hosaini. experienced,” said El-Hosaini.

Since her breakthrough with the famous crime drama in London My brother is a demon in 2013 (starring young Letitia Wright in her feature film debut), many in the film world were waiting to see what the filmmaker born in Wales but raised in Cairo would do next. follow.

She has directed several television shows (including episodes of the London police comedy-drama produced by Danny Boyle). Babylon) and worked on several projects she’s been trying to work on (including an ambitious movie about the Jonestown Massacre). But there’s no rush. “I work with a compass, not a clock,” she says. “It is always about quality, not quantity. You spend years of your life making these, so it must be for emotional reasons. “

afterward Swimmers – first announced in 2017 – shows up and she has to hit the pause button on top of everything else. “It sounds cliché, but it’s one of those things that you just know you’re capable of doing and you’re the right person.”

By the time El-Hosaini joined the project, Thorne had already written the first script. But the director notes that she has a “very specific” way she wants the Mardini girls to be. So the two started working together. “Jack is so lovely and generous and smart, and he built the most amazing structure, and it feels like I can go in and take the dialogue, move the furniture and carry what I want. can do it.”

Among the aspects El-Hosaini was able to add were those that reminded her of her own teenage years in Cairo: the fun years, the school, the sibling relationships, and the happy times. very ordinary moments of adolescence. Because, unlike many movies about refugees, or even the Middle East for that matter, Swimmers shows the two sisters – played by Lebanese sisters Nathalie Issa (Yusra) and Manal Issa (Sara) – as teenagers and living a recognizable middle-class life – even as their lives Civil war is going on in the background.

El-Hosaini said: “In cinema, young Arab women are often victims either very religious, or just a certain type of woman that I have little to do with. “There is a whole section of society that is never shown in the cinema.”

To find the top two, a search for the actor went on for more than a year. Initially, El-Hosaini sought out Syrian actors, but she soon discovered that the paperwork situation for most of the main candidates – many of them in the process of specific asylum – would prevent them from traveling to London, Brussels and Turkey for the shoot.

Wanting to speak native Arabic (the first part of the film, in Syria, is all in Arabic), she expands her search to Lebanese, Jordanian and Palestinian names, which is where Manal Issa, whom El- Hosaini remembers from an independent Lebanese film, into the picture.

Luckily, Manal said she had a younger sister, Nathalie, who was in Paris at the time studying for a master’s degree in literature. She is not an actress, but had a very small role in a movie, with a few lines. Both were convinced to audition. “As soon as I saw them together and the chemistry that sisters really bring, there’s something magical there that you just can’t replicate. That was a no-brainer for me. “

However, there is a problem. Neither sister can swim. So they started to study daily, exercise and make a nutrition plan. “I think it was a shock to the system for their couple,” El-Hosaini noted. “Obviously, we’re not going to get them to the level of being Olympic swimmers, so we have a doubles team.”

Rather poetic, one of the two is Yusra Mardini herself.

Although using Olympic-standard doubles may seem a bit excessive, Swimmers not only brings the story up to the heroic Aegean crossing. It followed up with the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio, where Yusra famously competed for the newly formed Refugee Olympic Athletes Team. But to get to this exhilarating point, it took an arduous, dangerous and emotional journey, even overcoming a perilous boat ride.

After landing in Italy, the sisters joined thousands of refugees from across the Middle East, Africa and Asia as they struggled to find their way through Europe to Germany (where they now live), on Roads are scammed and abused by smugglers, get caught up in anti-refugee sentiment and face red tape levels of dismay. Because the central story of the film is about the Mardini sisters – who actually make up 1% of those who have succeeded in making a new life in their newly adopted country – El-Hosaini wants to use Swimmers to “glorify the 99 percent” whose stories are not the same.

To help achieve this, she created the fictional character Nizar, the sisters’ cousin (played by Egyptian actor Ahmed Malek, who starred in Mohamed Diab’s) Conflict). Although the girls traveled with two male cousins, these were combined into one character, “to allow us to tell the story of most of the refugees.” Through Nizar, a budding DJ and musician in Damascus, reality is clear to those battling seemingly endless barriers and the bureaucracy of the refugee status exposed, with a desire to wants his life – and sense of self-worth and sense of identity – to be slowly crushed with each step. The others in the film didn’t even make it to Europe and were sent back home.

“Because it doesn’t have to be a happy ending,” El-Hosaini said. “That’s why Yusra and Sara’s story is so extraordinary, remarkable and inspiring. Because it is unique. However, you also need to respect reality.”

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