“The swimmers”, the tragedy of migrants in a true story with a happy ending (score 7)- Corriere.it

“The Swimmers”, an Anglo-American production directed by Sally El Hosaini, is one of those films full of human misadventures that you have to go and look on Netflix because they are not promoted by marketing as they do not whistle on 5th street or tell love stories in the Victorian era, nor interiors with noble houses, but they are lurking to rob you of a right emotion and an inevitable concussion. But with that tragedy that just happened on the Calabrian coast near Crotone, it becomes a memorandum on our history, on the increasingly distant problem of migrants.

Compared to reality, this story, although it really happened, has a happy ending. It’s a bitter but measured film, with all the options of the truth, which talks about migrants and injustices, hardships, journeys into the unknown, just like a piece of direct news that we are now used to (a very ugly verb) hearing in tiggì. But the human and sporting history mixed together is in any case reproduced with fidelity and measure, without rhetoric or pietism, if ever cheering a lot for the victory, which punctually takes place in the second part of the film which is very different from the first because it is based on the swimming Olympics of Rio in 2016, where the Syrian athlete has great personal success.

If we add that the adventure ends well, you can easily see and get excited about “The swimmers”, because it is a film useful for understanding many today’s phenomena and also an antidote against certain proud diktats on sea rescues, made increasingly difficult today, in outrage to any human factor. The added value is that the story of the two Syrian sisters Yusna and Sarah Mardini is incredibly true (like the two American tennis sisters in the film with Will Smith), since the path of hope first from the tormented homeland bombed in the war to Turkey, then Greece, in the small overloaded dinghy from Smyrna to Lesbos, finally in Germany, it is truly a journey that is feared with no return, in addition to the dangers even when they are “sheltered” in Europe.

Minimized, made a little stereotyped the psychological and family implications with the computer that saves the contacts while the initial paternal perplexities are overcome by a cousin who offers himself as an escort, the film is based on the determination and dreams of the moments of glory of one of the two sisters. It is the one destined to escape for victory, Sarah, who swims not for Syria but for the National Refugee Team. Vittoria, as has been said, but the closing credits inform us that the troubles do not end here and that the other sister will be arrested in 2018 while she is helping a ship full of migrants like hers had been: but this part is certainly sacrificed in honor of the sporting challenge that follows the classic process of the many films that tell the story of competitions, just like those that talk about the preparation of a show. In the cast it seems there are also some refugees who have been called to relive their nightmare again, parading as extras on the chorus line of the most heartbreaking and unsolvable tragedy of the contemporary world.