| Photo: Courtesy of Sundance Institute
In Izmir, Turkey, a Syrian refugee family packs for a crossing that has the props of a holiday and the stakes of a wager. Life vests are tightened, backpacks filled, phones committed to waterproof holders. The children cannot hide their excitement for Germany, as if the dinghy waiting outside the frame were a shuttle to the seaside. The dissonance is disarming, and it sets the tone. When the future is a rumour, hope often has to behave like normal life.
Co-directed by Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes, and winner of Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary Directing and Audience Awards, One In A Million follows the family for roughly a decade, largely through their 11-year-old daughter Israa. The route begins with the Aegean crossing from Turkey to Greece, then continues on foot through Greece and the Western Balkans, onward to Austria, and finally Germany, where they settle. The approach stays close to bodies and routine rather than turning peril into spectacle. That restraint works, because the danger does not need embellishment. The Aegean crossing is one of those passages where the viewer supplies the fear even when the camera does not underline it.
The most quietly transformative presence is Israa’s mother, Nisreen. Denied schooling and married young to Tarek, she arrives with the compressed posture of someone whose world has long been measured in rooms. On the road, in rain and cold, pushing through rough conditions with a stroller-bound child with disabilities, she experiences a paradoxical freedom. She calls the journey a lovely excursion, marvelling at walking in the rain. The line lands with complicated force. Flight is not only trauma. Sometimes movement itself feels like permission.
As the years pass, the centre of gravity shifts from borderlines to interior lines. Israa grows up in Germany, and the central tension becomes the deterioration of her relationship with her father. Growing pains collide with cultural mismatch. Tarek tries to retain the household status quo with an intensity that hardens over time as the family’s public world liberalises, pushing control to extreme ends. One In A Million signals this escalation, yet it often glides past the specifics, leaving the viewer to infer the shape of what is happening rather than confronting it directly.
The distribution of attention is also uneven. Israa and her parents are interviewed and granted interiority, while other siblings appear with far less narrative agency, including the sister with disabilities, who risks becoming presence without personhood. When a decade is compressed into 100-odd minutes, elisions are unavoidable, but here the omissions feel like a pattern. The most volatile, morally complicated material is treated as turbulence to pass through rather than weather to be reported. That same tendency shows up in how the documentary handles the world outside the apartment. The directors keep the major political events of a historically volatile decade mostly peripheral.
Poetically, Israa’s arrival into adulthood coincides with the fall of the Assad regime, giving the story a narratively neat place to land. Now happily married and a mother, she travels to post-Assad Aleppo. The trip is not presented as a simple homecoming. Israa circles the question that matters: did we only visit, or are we returning for real. Standing amid rubble, the distinction stops being semantic and becomes existential. What follows is a knotty reflection on diaspora and polypatria, on who carries the duty to rebuild shattered cities, and on what “belonging” means when it is split across places and legal statuses. There is no single answer, and that uncertainty is exactly what may stay with viewers.
Yet the surrounding post-Assad reality, its instability and practical messiness, is barely named, leaving the moment to function more as emotional threshold than lived condition. The title seems to gesture toward scale as much as intimacy. One girl in a sea of displaced lives, and perhaps a nod to the sheer number of Syrians now living in Germany. What lingers are the moments that refuse easy categories. Children buzzing behind life vests, a mother finding freedom in rain, a daughter becoming someone her father cannot contain. When it looks directly at lived experience, it is piercing. When it skims the sharpest edges of domestic control and leaves the post-2024 context implicit, it stops just short of the depth it otherwise earns.
Reviewed on: 30 Jan 2026
