‘One In A Million’ review: Compelling doc follows a Syrian refugee to a new life in Germany

Dirs: Itab Azzam, Jack MacInnes. UK. 2026. 102 mins

The life of one Syrian family reveals multiple facets of the refuge experience in One In A Million. Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes’s documentary that follows a young girl’s flight from Syria to a new life in Germany. Filmed over 10 years, her story is one of rupture and resilience that grows more compelling as it moves beyond the happy ending of reaching safety.

A complex, thought-provoking human interest film

The bittersweet realities of being a stranger in a strange land create a complex, thought-provoking human interest film that should find a welcome at festivals and beyond following a world premiere in Sundance’s World Cinema Documentary competition. The film is a co-production between PBS’s Frontlight Features and BBC Storyville, and PBS have US distrbution rights.

We first see Israa returning to Aleppo in 2025 after the fall of the Assad regime. Her memories of the place are marked by bloodshed and death. Familiar places have been reduced to rubble by barrel bombs, but there are signs of new life. She is asked if she is here to visit or to stay, further begging the question of where she now considers home.

We are then transported back to 2015, when Azzam and MacInnes first met the then-11 year-old Israa selling cigarettes on the streets of Izmir in Turkey. Her family had left Syria and begun an epic journey to their ultimate destination of Germany. Israa is bright, cheerful and very at ease in front of the camera. She rushes to embrace the future with endearingly unrealistic expectations of Germany as a promised land that will reward them with a big house, drink and baskets of fruit. Her father Tarek is acutely aware that he is “gambling with the lives of my children.”  Her mother Nisreen is not convinced that the family should have left.

Throughout One In A Million, the camera acts as a confessional. Framed against a black background, people share feelings and fears that they are often unable to reveal to their loved one. Azzam and Macinnes become deeply embedded with the family, but it is these quiet moments of reflection and introspection that give a deeper sense of what is going on in their lives. 

Azzam and Macinnes follow the family every step of the way, from braving threatening nighttime seas in a dinghy headed for Greece to the journey onwards through Serbia, Austria and other countries to Germany. It is a route that feels sadly familiar from television news reports to other documentaries, including Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire At Sea (2016),  and fiction such as Agneiszka Holland’s Green Border (2023).

The family’s arrival in Germany might be the film’s obvious conclusion, but looking beyond that helps to create a much more interesting film. Watching Israa grow up before our eyes inevitably invites comparisons with Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (2014), and she happily embraces the challenge of learning a new language, making new friends and creating a different life. She is soon playing football, wearing make-up and savouring experiences she would never have had in Syria.

Her father Tarek initially embraces the possibilities offered by Germany but gradually resents the loss of control over his daughter and family. The film gradually evolves into a portrait of Israa, Tarek and Nisreen as they react to their lives in Germany and the changes demanded by their brave new world. Nisreen flourishes (“ I’ve changed from the earth to the sky” she claims), Israa becomes a typical teenager and Tarek struggles. The tensions in their lives unfold against a changing Germany, where the rise of far right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) reflects a hardening of attitudes towards refugees. 

By the time Israa makes an emotional returns to Aleppo in 2025, the film has made it clear that everything about her life has changed. Exile gained her freedom and opportunity – but at an enormous cost to her sense of identity and the certainties that once united her family.