The Swimmers

Sally El-Hosaini's The Swimmers (2022) tells the true story of the Mardini sisters, Syrian swimmers whose flight from war became one of the defining refugee journeys of the last decade. A British-American production made for Netflix, it opened the Toronto International Film Festival as a Gala Presentation and went on to a BAFTA nomination for Outstanding British Film, bringing a widely reported news story to the screen with intimacy and force.

The roles of Yusra and Sara Mardini are taken by the real-life sisters Nathalie and Manal Issa, whose unforced chemistry grounds the film's sweep in genuine sibling feeling. El-Hosaini moves between the textures of ordinary teenage life in Damascus, the terror of a sea crossing, and the discipline of elite sport, refusing to let her protagonists become symbols rather than people. The much-discussed Aegean sequence — in which the sisters' competitive swimming becomes a matter of survival — is staged with harrowing restraint, while the later turn toward Olympic ambition lends the story its uplift.

Released to a wide audience on Netflix, the film drew praise for its humane, unsentimental treatment of displacement and for the naturalism of its young leads. It belongs to a growing body of European cinema that puts the refugee experience at its centre, and it does so without losing the shape of a classic sports drama: a story of two sisters, a single dream, and the distance between a bombed-out pool and the world stage.