One in a Million: the epic film that humanises the refugee experience - and the Syrian woman who made it

“I thought I was making one kind of film, and then it turned out to be something different,” Itab Azzam says. Azzam, a 45-year-old woman with a thoughtful, unassuming manner, is sitting with me in a cafe in north London. We already know one another (I chair the charity that she set up, Makani) but today we have met to talk about her Sundance prize-winning documentary One in a Million. Filmed by Azzam and her husband, Jack MacInnes, over 10 long years, One in a Million is an intimate as well as epic portrait of one refugee girl finding her way through a world in crisis. 

It all started back in 2015, when over a million refugees entered Europe by sea, about half of them fleeing the conflict in Syria. That year, Azzam and MacInnes were working on the BBC documentary Exodus, which closely followed several refugees on their journeys to Europe. One day they were in Turkey, filming the comings and goings of smugglers and refugees in Basmane Square in Izmir, when “this amazing, bubbly, smiling girl appeared in front of us”. The way Azzam tells the story of that meeting, 11-year-old Israa chose them rather than them choosing her. “She really wanted to play with the camera and wanted to be filmed.”

The young Israa’s irrepressible energy is at the heart of the first part of the film. Her family’s harsh situation in Turkey, the terrifying voyage over the sea to Greece, the freezing, heavily policed borders of Serbia and Croatia, the crowded train to Germany – we see it all through her naive, wondering eyes. It’s very hard to watch this part of the film, given the degradation and vulnerability of her family and those around them, and for Azzam the experience was almost overwhelming. “It was devastating,” she says, in her quiet, direct way. “They could have been my parents, my cousins, my brothers.”

Azzam grew up in Taara, a village in Suwayda, south Syria. Her village was a mainly Druze community, more liberal than much of Syria, but women were still expected to stay in the domestic sphere. Azzam was always looking for a freer life. “I wanted to see the world. I was a feminist before I knew what feminism is.” Funnily, her first introduction to western culture came through watching reruns of Friends on forbidden television channels. But she was also supported in her desire for wider horizons by her family. “My father is a book-lover,” she says, and in the family house he created a unique library of thousands of books. 

Azzam went to university in Damascus and stayed there, but more and more both the oppressive regime and the patriarchal culture weighed on her. “Every day in Damascus I would get verbal abuse, harassment. Three times at least I was physically attacked.” But she lived in a pretty cosmopolitan bubble, working with foreign journalists – among them her future husband, MacInnes. She decided to come to Britain to be with him and to begin a master’s degree at Goldsmiths in London right at the start of the conflict in Syria in 2011. “I had always wanted to leave. And then when I left, I felt such loss. Friends were being arrested. Friends were being killed.” 

And as the conflict deepened, the great movement of Syrian refugees began, so many of them struggling and dying on the borders of Europe. “It was incredibly mentally devastating,” Azzam says, “to see, day after day, families taking children to try on lifejackets for that journey. It was heartbreaking. While I was working on Exodus, the body of Alan Kurdi was washed up, and I couldn’t speak for two days after that. It hit me really hard.” 

Once Israa and her family reached Germany, Azzam and MacInnes could have said goodbye to them and gone on to the next story. But something kept them together. “There was a bond that we had created, with the women in the family in particular. We felt: we can’t leave this family – and they didn’t want us to leave. They trusted us.” 

So they went on filming, going back and forth from London to Germany for 10 years. It is rare for film-makers to spend so long with their participants, and just as with the few others that have achieved such a feat – such as Seven Up or Richard Linklater’s film Boyhood – there is an inherent wonder in seeing the speeded-up transformation of the participants. Israa and her family change, they deepen, they learn, they grow. And as they do, they take the film in unexpected directions. 

“I thought the film was mainly going to be about integration,” Azzam says. “I thought Israa will become a doctor or something in Germany, that’s what she wanted. I thought, this is going to show westerners that these people can integrate and can do something with their lives. But it’s more complicated than that.” 

It is complicated. The teenage Israa decides that it isn’t necessarily western-style liberation that she is seeking, as she embraces wearing a hijab and a more traditional lifestyle. And the emotional focus of the film widens beyond Israa to her parents. We see her father, Tarek, struggling with the clash between the traditional values he knows and a freer society. And we see her mother, Nisreen, changing from a submissive wife into an independent woman. That was a real transformation. “She didn’t say a word to us for the first two weeks of filming,” Azzam says. “She was hiding in the corner, completely silent.” One of the most startling moments of the film is shown in flashback. We go back to the family trudging through the mud of Serbia, and we hear Nisreen’s voice, not complaining about the discomfort, but revelling in her new horizons. “This is freedom,” she says.

As Nisreen embraces her new freedoms, she also stands up against the abuse that has marked her life and eventually seeks a divorce. Azzam knows that some audiences will find the light that the film shines on the family’s internal struggles dismaying, but for her it’s vital. “People gloss over the kind of abuse that Nisreen was exposed to, and many Syrian women are exposed to. There is not enough courage to talk about it.” 

At the end of 2024, Azzam and MacInnes thought that they had at last finished their monumental work, and were making a final visit to the family to wrap up. “We didn’t even have our cameras with us. We were having dinner together, and all our phones were ringing. And we realised the regime was falling.”

Yet that turnaround in their home country does not bring closure for Israa and her family. European governments have embraced the new Syrian leadership, clearly in the hope that refugees will return; Germany’s Friedrich Merz said earlier this year that he believed most Syrians in Germany would now go back. One in a Million illuminates how elusive such hopes might be. Israa makes an emotionally charged visit to the new Syria, but as she seeks out old childhood haunts in the rubble of Aleppo, the audience sees very clearly that there is no easy way back to a country that has been so devastated. 

And Azzam herself can bear witness to this truth. Because at the same time that she was working hard to keep up with the twists and turns in Israa’s life, she was dealing with a new, crushing reality for her own family. 

Viewed from one perspective, Itab Azzam’s life is one of extraordinary success. Since leaving Syria, she has been part of many brave, groundbreaking projects. There is not just Exodus and One in a Million, but also acclaimed theatre productions with refugees – Antigone in Lebanon and Lysistrata in London. She has published a Syrian cookbook with Dina Mousawi and set up the charity Makani, which enables refugee women to earn a dignified living through handicrafts and supports them through therapy and creative projects. Azzam and MacInnes have become part of a network of creative, engaged, like-minded people. They have a six-year-old son and a bright, welcoming house in London. So far, so good, and even enviable.

But the life of a refugee can remain so fragile. 

The fall of Assad brought celebration at first for Azzam and her family, but then tragedy. “I find the embrace of the new Syrian government in the west absolutely mind-boggling,” she says. “It is littered with real extremists. They are rolling back women’s rights. They’ve unleashed extremist factions. All minority groups in Syria are terrified.” Her own home village was attacked and occupied by armed factions enabled by the government in summer 2025. Luckily her parents were visiting her in London at the time, but 17 of her relatives were killed, her family house was burned and her father’s library is now in ashes. 

This new experience of loss has almost overwhelmed her. Still, she keeps going. She is now busy – with MacInnes and with Israa – taking their film out across the world. Audiences are already proving enthusiastic, and no wonder. One of the great tragedies of our time is the dehumanisation of those who cross borders. Enabling Israa and her parents to tell their stories in all their intimate, messy truth pushes back against that dehumanisation. The simplest moral truth right now is that there is no simple truth, that each of us is as human and as worthy of recognition and rights as any other. If only every person who needs to understand that could watch One in a Million.

One in a Million is in cinemas from Friday 6 November

Natasha Walter is an author and founder of Women for Refugee Women. Her most recent book, Feminism for a World on Fire, is published by Virago. You can buy it at the Nerve Bookshop at a discounted price.