'One in a Million': Syrian refugee's tale wows Sundance Film Festival

Documentary describes the travails of a young Syrian girl and her family

PARK CITY, UTAH, US:

As a million Syrians fled their country's devastating civil war in 2015, directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes headed to Turkey where they would meet a young girl who encapsulated the contradictions of this enormous migration.

In Ismir, they met Isra'a, a then-11-year-old girl whose family had left Aleppo as bombs rained down on the city, and who would become the subject of their documentary "One In A Million," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.

For the next ten years, they followed her and her family's travels through Europe, towards Germany and a new life, where the opportunities and the challenges would almost tear her family apart.

There was "something about Isra'a that sort of felt to us like it encapsulated everything about what was happening there," MacInnes told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Friday.

"The obvious vulnerability of her situation, especially as being a child going through this, but that at the same time, she was an agent.

"She wasn't sitting back, waiting for other people to save her. She was trying to fight, make her own way there."

The documentary mixes fly-on-the-wall footage with sit-down interviews that reveal Isra'a's changing relationship with Germany, with her religion, and with her father.

It is this evolution between father and daughter that provides the emotional backbone to the film, and through which tensions play out over their new-found freedoms in Europe -- something her father struggles to adjust to.

Isra'a, who by the end of the film is a married mother living in Germany, said watching her life on film in the Park City theatre was "beautiful."

And having documentarists follow her every step of the way as she grew had its upsides.

"I felt like this was something very special," she told the audience after the screening. "My friends thought I was famous; it made making friends easier and faster."

Search

Family is also at the center of Michal Marczak's beautifully-shot "Closure," which landed at Sundance on Friday.

The intensely cinematic documentary tells the story of a father's search for his teenage son, who vanished from a bridge over the Vistula River, Poland's longest water course.

Over 12 months, Marczak follows Daniel as he searches the river, using boats, underwater drones and hand tools, torn between the dread that he might find Chris' body and the desperate hope that he might be alive.

The river, at times hauntingly beautiful and others murky and unknowable, offers a mirror to Daniel's torment, and to the increasingly fragile hope of his wife, Agnieszka, that Chris will one day come home.

Daniel's quest expands from the river into the digital world, as he tries to understand how a generation that seems constantly connected can sometimes feel so cut off.

His unrelenting river search lends him a degree of fame in Poland, and he is contacted by another father whose child is missing, eventually helping him to find her body.

Marczak said he had begun the film almost by accident, when he and his wife were rafting down the river thinking about a fiction project when they ran into trouble.

"We were trying to dock on this island, it got quite dangerous," he said.

"Then out of nowhere, this man appeared and he guided us to safety and that was Daniel.

"We spent the night together by the campfire, and he told us about why he's there. I saw the emotions and...I just couldn't stop thinking about it."

At that moment, he decided to abandon the feature project and make a documentary instead.

Sundance Film Festival runs until February 1. Sundance began in Salt Lake City in August 1978 as the Utah/US Film Festival in an effort to attract more filmmakers to Utah.[6] Robert Redford, who was based in the area, was its main founder, with the festival eventually being named for Redford's "Sundance" land he purchased in the nearby Wasatch Mountains;[1] Redford had renamed this land after his character in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.[1] It was also co-founded by Sterling Van Wagenen,[7] head of Robert Redford's company Wildwood Enterprises, Inc, John Earle and Cirina Hampton-Catania[8] of the Utah Film Commission.[9] The 1978 festival featured films such as Deliverance, A Streetcar Named Desire, Midnight Cowboy, Mean Streets, and Sweet Smell of Success.[10]

The goal of the festival was to showcase American-made films, highlight the potential of independent film, and increase visibility for filmmaking in Utah. The main focus of the event was to conduct a competition for independent American films, present a series of retrospective films and filmmaker panel discussions, and celebrate the Frank Capra Award.