You May Have Missed One of the Most Powerful Films About the Syrian War

At the heart of the film is a true story. Sisters Yusra and Sara Mardini grew up in Damascus and were professional swimmers. When the Syrian war reached their doorstep in 2015, they were forced to flee. Along with their cousin, they set out for Europe via Turkey and Greece—a route that became the only lifeline for millions of Syrians. On an overcrowded inflatable boat stranded in the Aegean Sea, the engine failed. The Mardini sisters—Syria’s top swimmers—jumped into the water and swam for three hours alongside the vessel, keeping it afloat and saving 18 people. The film portrays this moment without melodrama—which is exactly what makes it so haunting.

The film goes beyond a heroic episode. It's a story of loss, transition, coming of age, and resistance. Yusra continues her journey—first to a refugee camp, then to Germany, where she resumes training and, in 2016, competes in the Rio Olympics as part of the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team. Sara, meanwhile, steps away from her sports career and later becomes a volunteer on the Greek island of Lesbos. She was arrested and charged with aiding illegal immigration—essentially for helping people who found themselves in the same situation she once faced.

The film’s director, Sally El Hosaini, deliberately avoids moralizing. Her camera follows the sisters without spelling out who is right or wrong. Instead, the viewer is invited to experience the journey—from a destroyed home to an unfamiliar world where one must prove the right to exist. The European refugee reception system is portrayed not as a caricature, but as an indifferent mechanism: lines, tent camps, plastic wristbands, and the inability to understand when and what will happen. No threats, no kindness—just functionality.

The film’s tone delicately balances the personal and the political. The sisters’ story is extraordinary, yet it is told as if it were ordinary. That creates a striking effect. The viewer suddenly realizes that hundreds of thousands of "ordinary" refugees could have been the heroes of such a film—but weren’t, simply because their names are unknown, their stories never recorded.

"The world wouldn’t have ended if one of us had stayed in Syria," says one of the sisters in a scene filled with hopeless clarity. This succinct conclusion sums up a whole generation forced to choose between dying at home and surviving in a foreign land. Behind every refugee camp lies a destroyed city; behind every “displaced person” status is a biography—with dreams, friends, families, and routines.

The film also has a gendered dimension. At the center are two young women who neither ask for protection nor play the victim. Their strength doesn’t lie in aggression but in persistence—a strength they channel not only into athletic achievement but also into an act of civil resistance. Their story is not about exceptions, but about a norm that deserves to be seen.

After its release, the film received critical acclaim but never became a major media event. Perhaps because it doesn't fit into familiar narrative frames. It doesn’t sell hope or dramatize tragedy. It simply records the truth. And the truth is this: at the borders of Europe — even now, a decade after the height of the Syrian crisis — the struggle continues between what some countries call "security policy" and others call "the right to live."

The Swimmers is not a film about sports, or war, or refugees. It is about a choice no one should ever have to make: to stay and die, or swim into the unknown. And about how, despite everything, people keep moving — not out of fear, but toward dignity.