One night in 2015, filmmakers Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes met a young girl selling cigarettes on a street corner in Turkey. Her name was Israa, she was 11 years old, and like so many of the other refugees in the neighborhood her family had recently fled to the port city of Izmir in order to escape the devastation of the Syrian civil war. Smart, smiley, and bursting with undimmed enthusiasm despite such difficult circumstances, Israa was such an irresistible documentary subject that Azzam and MacInnes — who had fled Syria themselves in 2011 — decided to follow the girl’s family as they continued along their perilous trek to Germany, Europe’s most popular destination for asylum-seekers. Upon reaching Cologne, however, it quickly became apparent to the directors that the most fraught and complicated portion of Israa’s exodus was just beginning. The journey from Aleppo had almost been as dangerous as it would have been for her family to stay there, but neither artillery shells, overcrowded boats, nor the constant threat of being sent back were as difficult for the girl to survive as the twin pains of exile and assimilation. Azzam and MacInnes would continue to film Israa for another 10 years, only stopping — as we see in the recently shot bookends of the sweeping, humane, and deeply heartsick documentary they’ve cut together from that decade of footage — when she was able to safely visit Syria again in 2025. “War is not the hardest thing a person can go through,” Israa’s voiceover intones as she looks at the bombed out ruins of the neighborhood where she was raised. “It’s not as hard as what comes after.”Despite an occasional tendency to speed through its most compelling passages and flatten their mottled texture under the weight of Simon Russell’s emotionally instructive score, “One in a Million” is still a raw and absorbing epic about “what comes after” — one that naturally unfolds with all the joy, anguish, and unresolvable inner conflict of life itself. ~this review continues on IndieWire~
