There are few bigger flexes you can have as a filmmaker than the the flashback that occurs only moments into “One in a Million,” first following Israa and her husband Mohammad into Syria with the images from Aleppo alone bound to take one aback as Israa tries to fathom that it was a place once inhabited by millions and by 2025 has been reduced to rubble. However, the cut back to a decade earlier to Israa as an 11-year-old in Izmir, Turkey where her family was forced to flee, trying as best she can to enjoy her childhood under the precarious circumstances, packs even more of a punch when for as scarce as present-day images from Aleppo are, rarer still is the dedication Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes show in tracking the true cost of being a refugee as it considers just how much moving about reshaped the young girl’s life as well as her family as a whole.
The path from Turkey back to Israa’s ancestral home of Syria is hardly direct, but it takes even more surprising twists and turns than any onlooker might reasonably expect when the hardships of moving from place to place aren’t expressed as they typically are. Surely putting the food on the table for Israa’s large clan isn’t easy nor squeezing inside the cramped quarters they share, but Azzam and MacInnes don’t spend much time lingering on how difficult life in general must be for them when 11-year-old Israa is introduced on the streets, setting up a makeshift cigarette stand alongside dealers of battery chargers and life vests at a street market near a local port that are necessitates for other migrants like herself with arduous journeys ahead. At first, it may seem strange that as magnetic as Israa is with her cherubic dimples and uncommon joie de vivre, she draws all of the filmmakers’ attention when there’s enough hints of interesting things happening outside of her purview — she mentions on the dock how useful floaties could be for her disabled sister and when the camera goes gravitate elsewhere, it privileges her father Tarek, who grapples with the choices he has to make for all of his family, while her mother Nisreen remains largely unseen, assumed to be working far less in hypotheticals as she takes care of them.
What looks like an oversight comes into focus as Tarek decides the family’s best option is to resettle in Europe, traveling by foot through Serbia to Germany where Israa, at the age of 12 is poised to spend her teenage years. The family would seem to embrace the west as Israa dances to “Despacito” and considers herself a Belieber circa 2016 and Tarek is overjoyed to see people in the streets standing up for democracy after leaving an oppressive regime, but the freedom doesn’t seem to extend to Nisreen, who is finally asked by the filmmakers, “How would you tell me your life story?” Not only does she share a very different version of events than what’s come before, but Azzam and MacInnes are able to show how immigration narratives in general have been polluted by having a typically patriarchal point of view, exposing a major blind spot when it isn’t only the family’s survival that’s treated with importance as it relates to their travel but how dynamics shift in a completely different culture as Nisreen is far more conscious of, feeling trapped in a marriage that she never had reason to question before reaching Cologne when she didn’t know what she didn’t know when being deprived of an education or any travel outside of her initial home in Syria.
As “One in a Million” wears on, having gender be the lone determining factor for the role of head of the household is called into question when Mohammad is increasingly detached from any responsibilities, seemingly losing much of his identity when he is no longer a breadwinner as he once was with a shawarma stand in Turkey and what he has retained hasn’t been helpful to him when demands for Nisreen and Israa to fall in line as they would’ve in their former country have a radicalizing effect, particularly for the latter as she starts to become interested in boys. When the family as a whole never seems to be overly concerned with keeping a roof over their head, Azzam and MacInnes are able to hone in on the most interesting things going on inside, effects of resettlement that can’t possibly be predicted until they actually play out in reaction to new surroundings while holding onto the memory of old ones.
Ironically, the film’s secret weapon is the one that’s in front of the camera most when Israa is an unusually engaging protagonist that ends up challenging both the expected way for the story to unfold in her predominantly cheery disposition and its outcome when her judgment can be as questionable as it is for anyone moving into their early twenties. “One in a Million” is exceptionally relatable in that regard, separated from any international context at all in presenting their three main subjects as deeply complicated people whose lives are made only more so by one another as they adjust to a new normal, and perhaps its title implies just how universal an experience this is nowadays, but the time put in to capture it in all its dimension makes it truly unique.
“One in a Million” will premiere on “Frontline” on PBS and streaming following its festival run.