One in a Million review – deeply moving film about displacement, freedom and the upheaval of starting again

Following a Syrian mother and daughter over a decade, Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes capture a family transformed

There’s a startling moment in this BBC refugee documentary when Syrian mother Nisreen – in the apparently miserable situation of hiking across the Balkans towards Germany, four kids in tow – suddenly explodes with joy. “This is the best holiday I’ve ever had! It’s an amazing adventure. Now I have the chance to walk in the rain – I love it!” Shunted off early into an arranged marriage, never having left Syria until forced out of Aleppo by the civil war, for Nisreen this running jump into the unknown represents total liberation.

Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes’ superb, forthright and highly moving film bypasses the usual refugee dichotomies, that they’re either external threats or history’s victims. Instead of flat abstractions, we get the knotty reality. Focused over a 10-year period from 2015 to 2025 principally on Nisreen’s eldest daughter Israa, it presents an intimate chronicle of how geographical displacement and cultural dislocation reshape families and lives from the inside.

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