For 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’s the line between documenting the truth and protecting your subject?
That 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.
“In the first part of the film, he really is a heroic father,” MacInnes said during a Q&A following a screening of the documentary at the SCAD Savannah Film Festival on Oct. 29. “It just felt like this moment of the scales falling from our eyes,” he added of the revelation. “Have we been naive? What is happening here?”
When 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, “‘Don’t tell anyone. We want to deal with this ourselves,’” MacInnes recalled.
“We were obviously worried,” he explained further. “But 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.”
When 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. “The fact that she emerges from the shadows and finds herself — finds her voice — is such a key part of the story,” MacInnes said. Tarek, on the other hand, is living alone in a refugee camp, unable to face the reality of his actions.
Israa’s 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’s a development that initially surprised MacInnes and Azzam, particularly in light of her mother’s transformation, he admitted.
“The 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?” he said.
“It’s one of the reasons, at the end of the film, I loved coming back to [Israa’s] dreams when she came into Germany. She wasn’t saying, ‘I want to be an astronaut; I want to go to university.’ She was saying, ‘I want a home, and I want a bed.’ And that’s when we came to realize that what she had lost was family; her family had fallen apart. She’d lost home, she’d lost stability, she’d lost love,” MacInnes said.
The filmmakers continued following the journey of Israa, now 21, through her marriage to Mohammed, their family’s first visit back to Syria following the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s regime in 2024 and even Israa’s 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’s son.
“I was talking to Israa yesterday, and she was saying what she’s found is love. And we thought, if she’s found peace and love in this life she’s chosen, then actually there’s a lot for us to learn from that,” said MacInnes. “We came to a place where we saw what she was getting from her Muslim faith, which was peace and faith, and it’s beautiful, I think.”
Watch the full Q&A in the video above.
