You might remember the newspaper headlines about the Mardini sisters’ story. Professional swimmer Yusra escaped war-ravaged Syria with her sibling Sara and went on to become an Olympic athlete. As part of a desperate journey, the 17 and 20-year-olds became stranded in the middle of the Aegean sea on a sinking dinghy, before courageously pulling the boat to shore and saving the lives of their fellow passengers. But The Swimmers makes this tale, based on Yusra’s 2018 autobiography Butterfly, at once upsetting, accessible and uplifting.
“We’ve all seen the underdog, refugee to Olympian [story],” screenwriter and director Sally El-Hosaini says, Zooming in from her home in London, fogged-up glasses from just stepping out of the shower. “I thought it was going to be really reactive, really traumatic, really depressing. But when I read the story and googled Yusra and Sara – it sounds cliché but – I saw myself in them when I was younger. I had never seen young, modern, liberal Arab women on screen before, and I just had this sense that: ‘God, this is the movie I wish I’d seen when I was 16.’”
The Welsh-Egyptian filmmaker grew up in Cairo in the ’90s, “listening to The Pixies, Ramones and Smiths and wearing Dr. Martens and a black leather jacket,” she says. “Living a life that’s actually not that different to the West. It was that version of young Arab women that I wanted to capture, that you don’t really see on screen.”
The Middle East is often portrayed in a “beige palette”, she continues. “Having lived in various cities, it’s way more colourful. I wanted to show the reality of living there”.
El-Hosaini’s intention was to show the real coexistence with war experienced by many Syrians. Big pop powerhouse track Titanium by David Guetta and Sia acts as a motif sprinkled throughout the film, chosen after Yusra Mardini shared a playlist of what she’d been listening to in Damascus. Elsewhere on the soundtrack, Arabic pop and forward-thinking club sounds are used to illustrate the ordinary life the sisters enjoy, pre-migration. There’s a scene in which the women are dancing on the rooftop of a flashy open-air club where their cousin is DJing, while bombs drop in the sky behind them. “Yusra said to me: ‘Thank you, thank you for that scene. That’s exactly how it felt for us,’” says El-Hosaini.
The film also casts refugees in various roles – some of the actors in the Aegean sea crossing scene as well as Mo, the smuggler. “He did that same crossing, but in a wooden boat,” says El-Hosaini. “Hassan Akkad, our associate producer, took the same journey in a dinghy, he had all his mobile phone footage that he recorded of the journey and we used that as a resource. Ayman al Hussein, who acted but also worked on the production behind the scenes, he was in the Jungle in Calais. He came to the UK, into Victoria coach station, smuggled in a suitcase.”
“I used to joke that I had to go to every meeting with a box of tissues. And then I cried all through the edits. And I still cried at the movie!”
It was never El-Hosaini’s intention to make a political film with a capital “P”, she says. I ask about her thoughts on the recent news that home secretary Suella Braverman wants to ban migrants who enter the UK via channel crossings from seeking asylum (the United Nations high commissioner for refugees has said that any such law “would almost certainly breach the refugee convention”). Braverman also said it was her “dream” and “obsession” to see a flight take refugees to Rwanda.
