Film Review: The Swimmers (2022) by Sally El Hosaini

When thinking about festival openers, “The Swimmers” departs so much from Arab Film Festival's opening film, “The Blue Caftan.” Maryam Touzani's cinematic love triangle between a dying woman, her closeted tailor husband, and his assistant is achingly intimate. She aptly set up the AFF's own LGBTQ focus this year, opening up the festival to the many complexities that come with queer romance. “The Swimmers,” on the other hand, is more visibly Hollywood-esque. This based-on-true-events fiction film opened TIFF earlier this year, played at AFF last week, and is gearing up for its US Netflix debut on Wednesday. Perhaps the latter deal has influenced the film's own production, compressing it into a legible story for Euro-American audiences. Fitting of a streaming-only movie, “The Swimmers” repackages a harrowing refugee story into easily-digestible content, ready to be consumed at home. 

The Swimmers is screening at the Arab Film Festival

For “The Swimmers,” Sally El-Hosaini borrows the uplifting story of the Mardini sisters and irons out any kinks in their lives into a straightforward timeline. Here, Yusra Mardini (played by Nathalie Issa) and her sister, Sara (played by Nathalie's real sister, Manal) aim to represent Syria as professional swimmers. When the Syrian Civil War war arrives at their doorstep, however, the two sisters flee to Europe. “The Swimmers” follows their remarkable journey across Turkey, the Aegean Sea, and finally to Germany, where Yusra finds a supportive swim coach (Matthias Schweighöfer). Under his wing, Yusra competes as member of the Refugee Olympic Athletes Team (ROT) in the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, while Sara works with a refugee-facing non-profit in Lesbos. 

For those unfamiliar with the story of the Mardini sisters, “The Swimmers” baits its viewers into believing that the feature will just be joyful. El Hosaini spends a considerable amount of time before the sisters' journey to insist upon the girls' middle-class modernity. Yusra and Sara are comfortably bilingual; they liberally wear crop tops and fitted clothes; they dance to David Guetta's “Titanium” (2012). These girls, El Hosaini seems to imply, are no more different from you and I, viewers in North America and Western Europe. The only difference is that misfortune has befallen them instead of us.

This pause before diving into the girls' traumatic story might seem basic, but sets it apart all the same from other refugee stories. Oftentimes, refugee narratives are revisited in a similar manner to “Flee,” the Danish animated documentary about a queer man's escape from Kabul. Here, the refugee biography is defined by the dangers of escape and resettlement. In “The Swimmers,” however, El Hosaini uses the Mardini sisters' relatability to her advantage. To be a refugee is not a borne identity, nor is it a culturally confined one. Instead, it is an inconvenience made necessary by extreme circumstance. 

While El Hosaini's efforts are admirable, she goes one step too far in her plea for empathy. She resorts to common Hollywood tropes to define the Mardini sisters' cathartic journey to Rio. The sisters' lives are neatly split into one block and into the next; she showcases Yusra's athletic development through a mandatory training montage. There is one compelling, but short-lived moment, when Yusra openly chafes against her newfound identity as a Refugee Olympian instead of a Syrian one. But by this point, the clock is already ticking. El Hosaini condenses this bit as well, constraining the sisters' epic journey to 134 minutes. In El Hosaini's retelling of Mardini sisters' story, complications are more logistical than they are internal. Both Yusra and Sara are stalwartly steadfast in their goals towards the future, and the Issa sisters deliver equally unwavering performances.  

All in all, “The Swimmers” goes extraordinary lengths to show the humanity of the superhuman – of refugees and athletes, or in this case, the two in one. It is just a shame that the human should be so easily translated into Euro-American codes of filmic legibility. “The Swimmers” thus ends up not as the most remarkable or unique retelling of a harrowing runaway, but instead – strangely enough – as a feel-good refugee movie. 

“The Swimmers” will be on US Netflix starting from 23 November 2022.