Leaving your homeland is devastating, but instead of surrendering to despair, Yusra and Sara Mardini decided to put their home in the back of their minds and follow their passion to become champion swimmers.
That’s how Welsh-Egyptian director Sally El Hosaini tells the story of the two refugee sisters based on true events in her movie The Swimmers.
The film (134 min) was screened as part of the out of competition section at the Cairo International Film Festival (CIFF).
In this movie, El Hosaini portrays the sufferings of Yusra Mardini, a Syrian refugee who became an Olympic swimmer, and her sister to fulfill their potential.
Although many other movies and documentaries about refugees and their harrowing journeys to Europe are legion, but only a handful of films like The Swimmers follow the fortunes of athletes who became successful champions.
Yusra (Nathalie Issa) and Sara (Manal Issa) flee the chaos in Damascus in 2015 to find a better life in Germany.
Yusra’s family took the decision to send the girls to Europe only after a bomb dropped in the pool during one of Yusra’s races.
The sisters board an overcrowded rubber dinghy. Although the scene is familiar to most of us, it is very emotional, because we know they are repeated everywhere in real life.
Many of the illegal migrants on the dinghy took the same dangerous journey and ended up drowning, but Yusra and Sara , who were the only two on the boat who knew how to swim, survived.
The girls are coached by their father and Yusra dreams of competing in the Olympics. That dream seemed unattainable until she met a German swimming coach (Matthias Schweighofer), who told her that a new refugee team was being formed and that she could compete at Rio and represent Syria.
However, the movie tells us little about Sara, the elder sister.
The screenplay by El Hosaini and Jack Thorne is based on Yusra’s 2018 autobiography, Butterfly: From Refugee to Olympian.
Some of the characters were played by actual refugees who themselves had survived and reached Europe.
During a seminar at the Cairo Opera House after the screening, director El Hosaini recounted the difficulties she faced to make the film as realistic as possible.
The director also added that the actors of the movie come from different countries.
“Choosing a multinational cast was an important matter for me so that the actors would speak the correct Arabic language,” she added.
El Hosaini also explained that the auditions began in Syria, but a problem with travel permits forced them to open the auditions to actors from the entire Arab world because they are primarily looking for actors who resemble the characters of the film.
The director also added that she knew about the story of the two sisters from social media networks, which encouraged her to do her research to know all the details.
Writing the script took about 4 years, she added.
El Hosaini added that she was primarily concerned that the story touches the audience.
She explained that she knows a lot about swimming and what swimmers do in their daily lives, and she felt in contact with the two sisters – the protagonists of the film – because of this matter. She also watched their lives closely and talked with them about many things, including the songs they prefer.
The Swimmers was filmed in the UK, Turkey and Belgium and will be screened on Netflix on November 23.
