‘One in a Million’ Review: An Epic Syrian Refugee Documentary Offers a Vivid, Nuanced Portrait of Exile

Following a Syrian family for more than 10 years as they flee civil war and resettle in Germany, Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes' film offers rare insight into the complexities of finding a place to call home.

One night in 2015, filmmakers Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes met a young girl selling cigarettes on a street corner in Turkey. Her name was Israa, she was 11 years old, and like so many of the other refugees in the neighborhood her family had recently fled to the port city of Izmir in order to escape the devastation of the Syrian civil war. Smart, smiley, and bursting with undimmed enthusiasm despite such difficult circumstances, Israa was such an irresistible documentary subject that Azzam and MacInnes — who had fled Syria themselves in 2011 — decided to follow the girl’s family as they continued along their perilous trek to Germany, Europe’s most popular destination for asylum-seekers. 

Upon reaching Cologne, however, it quickly became apparent to the directors that the most fraught and complicated portion of Israa’s exodus was just beginning. The journey from Aleppo had almost been as dangerous as it would have been for her family to stay there, but neither artillery shells, overcrowded boats, nor the constant threat of being sent back were as difficult for the girl to survive as the twin pains of exile and assimilation. Azzam and MacInnes would continue to film Israa for another 10 years, only stopping — as we see in the recently shot bookends of the sweeping, humane, and deeply heartsick documentary they’ve cut together from that decade of footage — when she was able to safely visit Syria again in 2025. “War is not the hardest thing a person can go through,” Israa’s voiceover intones as she looks at the bombed out ruins of the neighborhood where she was raised. “It’s not as hard as what comes after.”

Despite an occasional tendency to speed through its most compelling passages and flatten their mottled texture under the weight of Simon Russell’s emotionally instructive score, “One in a Million” is still a raw and absorbing epic about “what comes after” — one that naturally unfolds with all the joy, anguish, and unresolvable inner conflict of life itself. 

Before Israa’s family reaches Cologne, however, the film is much simpler than that. There’s only so much room for nuance in the sight of an 11-year-old girl wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatsuit as she’s smuggled across the stormy waters of the Aegean Sea in a vomit-soaked dinghy, and even less in the thought of her little sister holding on for dear life next to her. (Jana has special needs, but Azzam and MacInnes neglect to specify what that entails, or how it complicates the relocation process.) Before Israa’s family reaches Cologne, her mother Nisreen — only 32 when she leaves Aleppo — is silent in her complete subservience, and her much older father Tarek is a gruff but loving confidant whose first priority is keeping everyone safe. 

Things change when the family begins to adjust to their new lives in Germany, though certain members do a lot more adjusting than others. Israa is young and pliable. She wants to forget about Syria, a place she only associates with blood in the streets, and resents the fact that her mom asks her to speak in Arabic when they sit for their semi-regular interviews with Azzam and MacInnes. She meets a devoted boyfriend on the internet (Mohammed, very much a man of his word), grows obsessed with “Despacito,” and learns to wear a different face at school than she does at home. 

Such code-switching assumes an uncomfortably literal bent given her father’s intense distaste for makeup, and for any of the other Western mores that conflict with the traditional culture he’s determined to preserve for his wife and children. Older, harder, and naturally less capable of living outside of the patriarchal system in which he was raised, Tarek is the “most Syrian” member of Israa’s family, and yet also the person most responsible for their decision to leave Aleppo behind. 

Needless to say, he struggles with life as a foreigner. Once the proud and open-hearted owner of a falafel shop, he soon becomes paranoid and distrusting of a country where people regularly display their hatred for his kind in the streets. Instead of finding work, he holes up inside and watches TV news all day. Instead of helping his eldest child to make the most of their new home, he beats her for daring to enjoy its liberties. Azzam and MacInnes too seldom acknowledge their own presence in Israa’s life, and in the film they’ve made about it, but we do hear them press Tarek and his Israa about the abuse; he denies it, and she tearfully tries to wish it away.

We don’t know the extent to which the filmmakers did or didn’t intervene, but “One in a Million” effectively answers our concerns by pivoting — for a moment — to Nisreen, who was forced to marry Tarek when she was a teenager, and now finds herself forced to negotiate the disconnect between Tarek and the teenager they had together. More formed than Israa, but also far more galvanized by the possibility that a woman’s life might not be limited to housework and having kids, Nisreen seizes on the chance to emancipate herself, and to show her children that they don’t have to suffer their father in silence. 

It’s Nisreen’s agency — and not Tarek’s violence — that ultimately inspires Israa to embrace Syrianness and Islam on her own terms, as she comes to discover personal freedom in wearing a hijab, and the strength to start a new family in the gift of Mohammed’s faith. The more independent that Israa becomes the more that she longs for her homeland, a dilemma that adds an inordinate weight to the question she’s posed when she returns to Aleppo in the film’s opening scene: Is she visiting, or is she staying?

The weight that question is able to assume speaks to the full power of a documentary that’s most effective when it collapses time and history onto itself, flattening a diaspora into a family, a family into a decade and a decade into 100 minutes. Like “Boyhood” or the “Up” series, “One in a Million” derives an uncanny vertigo from its fourth dimensionality, as it invites us to see human lives unfold in a kind of time-lapse. A story that might otherwise have been subsumed into the stuff of liberal empathy porn is sped up to the point where only its most fundamental truths are still visible to the naked eye, and the empathy we feel becomes more elastic — in that a portion of it extends to Tarek in the context of all that he’s endured — until it becomes transparent enough to peer into the deeper realities it tends to obscure. The psychic fallout of war. The need for a place to call home. And, perhaps most of all, the way that our personal and collective histories are shaped by the friction between survival and belonging. 

Jumping from 2025 back to 2015 in a single cut, or watching Tarek’s face as he views old footage from the start of his family’s journey, I couldn’t help but wish that “One in a Million” had been more aggressively self-reflexive and/or eager to disturb the linearity of its telling — that Azzam and MacInnes didn’t focus on the sweep of time at the expense of better articulating how it can seem to skip forward and circle back on itself in the same moment. As it stands, this often feels like a radical documentary that has been squeezed into the most conventional form that its subject can allow. Then again, that slightly generic quality never impinges on the film’s characterizations, and allows viewers to extrapolate the finer points of this story to the plights of so many other refugees, from Syria and elsewhere.

Like the loss of a parent or the loss of a child, the loss of a home is an exceedingly difficult thing for people to appreciate secondhand. Perhaps even impossible. The space between simple awareness and true understanding is narrow but chasmic — small enough to walk around but deep enough to contain so much of the worst barbarism this world has ever produced. “One in a Million” is a film that plunges into that gap with both eyes wide open, suspends itself in the air for as long as it can, and, in the darkness, shows us more about the psychic complexities of forced migration than most people are willing to see for themselves in broad daylight. 

Grade: B+

“One in a Million” premiered at the 2026 Sundance Film Festival. PBS Distribution will release it in the United States.

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