ONE IN A MILLION Documentary

Screening to be followed by a conversation with co-director, producer and cinematographer Jack MacInnes.

Winner of the Audience Award and the Directing Award in the Sundance Film Festival’s World Cinema Documentary section, this sweeping and intimate 10-year chronicle follows a Syrian family and their effervescent eldest daughter, Isra’a, as they make the perilous journey to Europe, then navigate the joys and heartaches of assimilation in Germany. Co-directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes embed themselves with the family starting in 2015, when Isra’a is 11 years old, as her father wrestles with gambling his four children’s lives on a dinghy across the Mediterranean in hopes of a better life away from war-torn Syria. One arduous journey follows another before they are able to settle in Germany. There, the confronting process of assimilation begins to fracture the family as the novelties and freedoms of their new home grate against the traditions and beliefs on which the family was built. Spirited Isra’a experiences it all: the hardships of migration, the new horizons of Western society and the alienation of a severed culture. With startling intimacy, aided by confessional-style interviews with Isra’a and her parents, the film captures an ordeal that is unique to this family yet is typical of what millions of people around the world experience every day. –Travis Weedon