Nominated for Best International Feature
Content Warning: violence
Tragedy strikes a Syrian family in Aleppo, starting a chain reaction of events involving five different families in four different countries.
Aleppo, Syria. A family is wiped out in a missile strike. The only survivors, a doctor (Yasmine Al Massri) and her daughter (Massa Daoud), take a perilous journey to escape their war-torn country. Meanwhile, a soldier (Yahya Mahayni) witnesses the execution of a boy and questions where his loyalties lie.
In Turkey, the smuggler Marwan (Omar Sy) organises a boat crossing to Greece. Fathi (Ziad Bakri) and his family flee their refugee camp. Unwittingly, Marwan puts Fathi in charge of the dinghy and, after a disastrous crossing, they are rescued by the Hellenic Coast Guard. The captain (Constantine Markoulakis) is haunted by those he cannot save. One of these characters ends up in Chicago.
Building a narrative that takes in eight years and four countries, Brandt Andersen expands his 2020 short Refugee with many accomplished actors returning to a story of conflict, devastation and the redemptive love of family.
Even with the brutality of war and the corruption of the human soul on full display, the film manages to avoid moral judgement, choosing to tell the story from five different perspectives. Eventually, the various strands coalesce as a satisfying but harrowing whole.
Gifted with a purity of vision and essential topicality, this is audacious, gripping filmmaking at its very best.
Review by Mickey La Rosa
