The Lanes Not Taken in The Swimmers
Netflix’s movie The Swimmers tied for most-watched film on the streaming company’s platform during the last week of November 2022 and continues to attract viewers worldwide. The film tells the captivating true story of competitive swimmers Yusra and Sarah Mardini, who leave their middle class home in war-torn Syria in 2015 and make a perilous trek from Turkey to Greece to Germany. In Berlin, Yusra finds a new coach and qualifies for the newly-created Refugee Olympic Team. Sarah decides to return to Greece to help other refugees; in 2018 she is arrested and charged with human smuggling and espionage, charges that are still outstanding and that Human Rights Watch has condemned as bogus.
By investing in this story, Netflix has increased its viewers’ awareness of a refugee crisis that’s as severe today as it was when the Mardini sisters left Syria in 2015. But the movie also raises questions about what the filmmakers left out and how they shaped the material.
At 2 hours, 14 minutes, The Swimmers is a long movie already and couldn’t possibly include every aspect of the Mardini sisters’ experience or the refugee experience in general. Still, I found it curious that the film says almost nothing about the causes of the war that drove Sarah and Yusra from their home.
At the beginning of the film, Sarah watches the 2011 Arab spring protests in other countries on YouTube in the middle of Yusra’s birthday party, but the film offers no information about how these protests are related to the situation in Syria. The film quickly fast-forwards to 2015, when the Mardini parents are trying to maintain a normal family life despite the violence erupting around them. After a bomb lands in the pool where Yusra is swimming during a competition, her parents have to acknowledge that daily existence has become perilous. Yet they try to dissuade their daughters from fleeing for Europe by mentioning the dangers they will face outside Syria. No one talks about why their country has become a battlefield or who was responsible for the bomb in the pool.
The omission of the war’s politics is one of many criticisms lobbed by Manal Issa, the French-Lebanese actor who portrays Sarah Mardini in The Swimmers. In an interview published in Middle East Eye, Issa also takes issue with the way the script has Sara and Yusra conversing in English more frequently than in Arabic. She voices several other complaints, including the cast’s dearth of Syrian actors and what she sees as thin character development.
Yusra and Sarah Mardini don’t seem to share Issa’s critique. They have been promoting the film and using their interviews as a platform to discuss the continuing refugee crisis as well as Sarah’s upcoming trial in Greece, which begins on January 10, 2023.
Yusra, not Sarah, is the movie’s focus. The second half of the film spends a lot of time showing Yusra in the pool, working with her coach. There’s a brief scene where Sarah tells Yusra about her plan to return to Greece and work with a refugee aid organization. But the action quickly switches back to Yusra’s training. The Swimmers ends with Yusra’s participation in the 2016 Olympics in Brazil — in other words, two years before Sarah’s 2018 arrest. Just before the credits start rolling, the film has a short written epilogue about the charges Sarah faces and the fact that the Mardini parents and their youngest daughter were eventually able to join Sarah and Yusra in Berlin.
It’s not surprising that the script centers Yusra. Her tale of overcoming extreme adversity to qualify for the world’s most competitive swim meet is genuinely moving. While watching the film, I was pulled into the drama of Yusra’s journey to the Olympics even though it was obvious she was headed for a Hollywood-style happy ending. I also liked the nuanced way the film depicted the loving yet prickly relationship between the two sisters.
But Sarah deserves to be a protagonist at least as much as Yusra. Sarah’s evolution from law student and competitive swimmer in a comfortable Damascus family to refugee in Greece and Germany to refugee aid worker who finds herself under arrest is even more dramatic than Yusra’s path to the Olympics.
There’s another fascinating tale that The Swimmers intersects with but gives even less attention than Sarah’s work aiding other refugees. It’s the story of why and how the Refugee Olympic Team came into being in 2016, and who its members were in addition to Yusra Mardini. The 2016 Refugee Olympic Team had 10 members, and the other nine athletes have stories as compelling as those of the Mardini sisters.
As the developed world becomes increasingly less hospitable to asylum seekers, it becomes increasingly more important that the stories of those seeking asylum reach the general public. The Swimmers tells one such story, and it’s a good thing that so many people have seen it on Netflix. I hope someone will also make a major feature or miniseries about Sarah’s journey and will be able to end it with the dismissal of the absurd criminal charges. And I hope there are filmmakers who will decide to tell the backstories of other members of the Refugee Olympic Team, which has now competed in every Olympics since 2016, as well as the story of the team itself.
This is the first piece of a short series inspired by The Swimmers.
