\n\tFor One in a Million filmmakers Jack MacInnes and Itab Azzam, documenting the life of a Syrian refugee family for more than a decade meant confronting a complicated question: What\u2019s the line between documenting the truth and protecting your subject?<\/p>\n
\n\tThat conundrum came to a head when a 14-year-old girl named Israa, whom the married documentarians had been following since the age of 11, when her parents decided to immigrate from Turkey to Germany, revealed that her father, Tarek, had hit her. The disclosure came as a shock, given the close relationship they initially witnessed between the pair.<\/p>\n
\n\t\u201cIn the first part of the film, he really is a heroic father,\u201d MacInnes said during a Q&A following a screening of the documentary<\/a> at the SCAD<\/a> Savannah Film Festival on Oct. 29. \u201cIt just felt like this moment of the scales falling from our eyes,\u201d he added of the revelation. \u201cHave we been naive? What is happening here?\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWhen the filmmakers returned to their home base of London, they questioned whether they should continue with the project and ensured Israa had the proper resources available to her. Her mother, Nisreen, pleaded with the duo, saying, \u201c\u2018Don\u2019t tell anyone. We want to deal with this ourselves,\u2019\u201d MacInnes recalled.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cWe were obviously worried,\u201d he explained further. \u201cBut it turned out Nisreen did have the courage to act and to tend to and look after her children, which ended up becoming the story.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWhen the documentary picks up two years later, Nisreen has left Tarek and is happily raising their four children alone, encouraging other women to leave an unhappy relationship despite the difficulty of being a single parent. \u201cThe fact that she emerges from the shadows and finds herself \u2014 finds her voice \u2014 is such a key part of the story,\u201d MacInnes said. Tarek, on the other hand, is living alone in a refugee camp, unable to face the reality of his actions.<\/p>\n \n\tIsraa\u2019s status at the time is a bit more complicated: the then-16-year-old newly embracing her Muslim faith and wearing the hijab, as she declares her boyfriend, Mohammed, has helped her find freedom through her religion. It\u2019s a development that initially surprised MacInnes and Azzam, particularly in light of her mother\u2019s transformation, he admitted.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cThe real exercise for the second half of the film [was] where we started to look at our own prejudices and our own views and started to think, the dreams we thought were her dreams, how much of that was our dreams for her?\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cIt\u2019s one of the reasons, at the end of the film, I loved coming back to [Israa\u2019s] dreams when she came into Germany. She wasn\u2019t saying, \u2018I want to be an astronaut; I want to go to university.\u2019 She was saying, \u2018I want a home, and I want a bed.\u2019 And that\u2019s when we came to realize that what she had lost was family; her family had fallen apart. She\u2019d lost home, she\u2019d lost stability, she\u2019d lost love,\u201d MacInnes said.<\/p>\n \n\tThe filmmakers continued following the journey of Israa, now 21, through her marriage to Mohammed, their family\u2019s first visit back to Syria following the fall of President Bashar al-Assad\u2019s regime in 2024 and even Israa\u2019s reconciliation with her father, who, near the end of the film, is finally able to own up to his abuse and is building a new relationship with his daughter as a grandfather to her and Mohammed\u2019s son.<\/p>\n \n\t\u201cI was talking to Israa yesterday, and she was saying what she\u2019s found is love. And we thought, if she\u2019s found peace and love in this life she\u2019s chosen, then actually there\u2019s a lot for us to learn from that,\u201d said MacInnes. \u201cWe came to a place where we saw what she was getting from her Muslim faith, which was peace and faith, and it\u2019s beautiful, I think.\u201d<\/p>\n \n\tWatch the full Q&A in the video above.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"For One in a Million filmmakers Jack MacInnes and Itab Azzam, documenting the life of a Syrian refugee…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":967225,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,22450,75,337,329721,328116,325399],"class_list":["post-967224","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-documentary","tag-entertainment","tag-movies","tag-scad","tag-scad-docs-to-watch","tag-scad-savannah-film-festival"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967224","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=967224"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/967224\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/967225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=967224"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=967224"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=967224"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}