One in a Million Is a Stunning Real-Life Refugee Epic

Filmmakers Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes first met Israa, the subject of their powerful documentary, One in a Million, when she was an 11-year-old selling cigarettes on a crowded street in the coastal city of Izmir, Turkey. Having fled with her whole family from the devastation of the Syrian Civil War — a missile had destroyed their home in Aleppo — the young girl was trying to earn money for an attempt to cross the Aegean Sea to Greece and then, hopefully, to a new life in Germany. The directors decided to follow Israa and her family’s voyage on foot and in buses, boats, and trains. The year was 2015, and the modern refugee crisis was in full force. But while One in a Million (premiering in the World Cinema Documentary section at Sundance) movingly depicts Israa’s odyssey, it truly comes into its own after the family arrives in Cologne, Germany.

A title like One in a Million may suggest a rather remarkable stroke of luck — and indeed, Israa and her family were fortunate in that their journey, while certainly harrowing, didn’t end in tragedy as so many others’ have. But it also evokes the idea that Israa is in fact one of many, just one member of a mass exodus that upended millions of lives. (Directors Azzam and MacInnes were themselves living in Damascus when war broke out in 2011 — Azzam is Syrian by birth — and fled to London later that year.) In Cologne, the family is greeted with a small but comfortable new home, and Israa enters a school where her classmates and teachers seem kind and curious to learn more about her. Over the years, however, things change. Israa begins to feel the prying eyes of others, and she begins to react against her family, in particular her father, Tarek, with whom she was once incredibly close but who now seems like a man out of time and place, wedded to traditions left behind. The natural obstinacy and rebelliousness of Israa’s teenage years are hyperaccelerated by culture clashes with both her family and the other kids around her.

As the years march on, Azzam and MacInnes check in regularly on Israa, Tarek, and her mother, Nisreen, capturing their lives in Cologne and filming them in sit-down interviews that show us how things have changed. The family falls apart. Nisreen demands her independence from Tarek, whom she and Israa accuse of hitting them. Once so close, Israa and her father stop talking. She falls in love with a young Syrian man named Mohammed. Although she seemed to have been thoroughly westernized, Israa becomes more devout and begins wearing the hijab she used to reject as a young girl. 

Longitudinal documentaries — shot over many years and following their subjects over wide swaths of their lives — sometimes have a tendency to totalize, almost as if their scope justifies and perhaps demands a solemn, all-encompassing thesis. But this thinking risks turning the people into something less than individuals. They become emblematic, more case studies or cautionary tales. One in a Million resists such easy compartmentalization. The camera’s eye is sympathetic, nonjudgmental toward Israa and her family. The filmmakers recognize that the question of identity for a young Syrian woman growing up in Germany in a huge family displaced by war is way too complicated to encapsulate in a few scenes; ditto for her parents, who were forced to leave behind the only country they ever knew. (Nisreen notes that their journey through Turkey, Greece, and the rest of Europe was the first time she’d ever left Syria.) Azzam and MacInnes give us a modern-day epic that traverses borders — truly, they’ve captured some incredible footage — but they outdo themselves by following that up with an absorbing, complex tale about the challenges of assimilation. And despite all the history swirling around her, Israa remains at the center of this film. The unique achievement of One in a Million lies in the way it allows us to know this young woman while it preserves the mystery of a human soul.

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