Winner of the jury award for direction and the audience award, Itab Azzam & Jack MacInnes’ One in a Million was one of the three films in the World Documentary Competition section of Sundance this year (Birds of War and Everybody to Kenmure Street being the other two) that were focused on migrants, showing different facets of the refugee experience.
A UK production, the German and Arabic film can well be called Azzam and MacInnes’ Boyhood (2014). However, unlike Richard Linklater’s much-celebrated coming-of-age epic, the Sundance winner is about a girl. It’s not an improvisational piece of fiction but an authentic record of her life journey.
What it shares with the 2014 film is the idea of capturing the passage of time in the life of its protagonist, how things alter with the change in circumstances, where it takes the person and what it makes of them.
Linklater shot his film over a period of twelve years, as his protagonist turned 18 from the six-year-old he was at the start. One in a Million covers a similar span. Filmed for ten years, from 2015-2025, it doesn’t just traverse time but also geographies. Isra and her family members are forced to travel to Germany from Syria, with the war looming large. The film also shows her return journey from Cologne to Aleppo. Caught between two homes, which of them is the real one for her? Obviously, then her experience of growing up (from the age of 11 to 21) becomes much more complex, intertwined with questions of nation, identity, family, culture, displacement, exile and belonging. There are the universal adolescent pangs of love and heartbreaks, of parental and peer pressure, all framed in and shaped by the overarching context of a clash of cultures.
Western liberalism locks horns with Syrian conservatism; the modern gets pitched against the traditional. Isra loses some even as she gains some—the warmth and comfort of family and community as opposed to the headiness of individualism. The confusion, lack of certitude and insecurity are inevitable then. As she engages with the new, the old will become distant, yet can’t be entirely denied or absent. It is, after all, a repository of her childhood memories.
The film begins at the end, so to speak, with Isra returning to Aleppo in 2025 after the fall of the repressive regime of Bashar Hafez al-Assad. She feels like a stranger in the hellscape surrounded by the remains of what were once homes. War is not the hardest, she states. It’s what comes after.
We then cut to the moment when the filmmakers met Isra for the first time, selling cigarettes on the streets of Izmir in Turkey in 2015, after the family’s flight from Syria. While she is optimistic about the future in Germany, her father, Tarek, isn’t. It’s the women, Isra and her mother Nisreen, who embrace the new reality more wholeheartedly than Tarek, resulting in a rift in the relationships.
The character-driven documentary becomes a fascinating exploration of the clear-eyed Nisreen, the maladjusted Tarek, but especially Isra, as her rebellious streak eventually paves the way to embrace her Islamic identity.
At the heart and soul of filmmaking is the incredible access that Azzam and MacInnes had been granted by the subject and her guardians. They are mindful of the trust and faith reposed in them. As a result, they bring a sense of both intimacy and a respectful distance to their camera as it zooms in on Isra and her family and friends. Their point of view is non-judgmental and empathetic. What could have keeled over and turned voyeuristic, remains a genuine, gentle and compassionate gaze. Editors Alec Rossiter and Iain Pettifer deserve as much credit for fashioning an engaging and emotional narrative from the enormous footage.
One in a Million is a no-holds-barred celebration of human resilience and adaptability, of a girl and an entire community, amid the insurmountable bleakness of the times.