Film Review

In The Swimmers, film director Sally El Hosaini powerfully dramatizes the distressing real-life journey of Yusra and Sara Mardini [1]. These two sisters are elite swimmers who flee Syria’s civil war and proceed to Germany through the Eastern Mediterranean route. In addition to being a survival story, The Swimmers is a powerful critique of modern border regimes and systems containing refugees. The film’s narrative spans from Damascus, destroyed by bombs, to refugee camps, and Olympic stadiums. In doing so, the film embodies numerous dimensions of forced displacement, whether physical, bureaucratic, or existential.

The film begins in Damascus, where the sisters belong to a middle-class family with aspirations and a clear vision for the future before war destabilizes their lives. Their migration route spans from Turkey to Greece, across the Balkans, with Germany being their destination. This route is shaped by geography and perpetually shifting borders and policies. These borders are not only lines on a map but institutions that regulate life and death for people like Yusra and Sara. El Hosaini represents this through the sisters’ direct experiences of extortion by smugglers, dangerous sea crossings involving swimming, border guards, and the dehumanization of camp life. The notion that borders are systems of violence and gatekeeping is illuminated by Nicholas De Genova’s concept of “border spectacle” [2]. This concept suggests that migrant suffering is not a tragic consequence of the issues in their homeland but a performance to gain sympathy and entrance to a foreign land. In a pivotal scene, the overcrowded inflatable boat carrying the sisters and other refugees begins to sink. Without hesitation, Sara and Yusra jump into the water to lighten the boat’s load, swimming for hours to keep the remainder of the refugees afloat and alive. This moment dramatizes the brutal indifference of border enforcement while underscoring solidarity amongst migrants. The border here is not a fixed barrier but a fluid (quite literally) and violent zone where the distinction between legal and illegal becomes a matter of survival.

Even upon reaching Germany, the concept of “arrival” turns out to be a myth, since they continue to struggle and are unsure whether they will be able to stay. As Yusra trains as a member of the Refugee Olympic Team, Sara becomes disappointed by the institutional narratives of “rescue”. They split ways, revealing two sides of the refugee experience: assimilation through visibility and resistance through activism. Yusra’s participation in the Olympics can be seen as a success story, as she is a living testament to the notion that refugees can overcome their trauma. However, the film complicates her accomplishment by showing how her image is instrumentalized by humanitarian organizations and the IOC. A scene shows a press officer advising her to avoid political questions and simply “focus on hope.” This moment of neutralization mirrors the critique raised by Malkki, who argues that humanitarian discussions typically remove refugees from their respective historical context [3]. This way, they are stripped of political subjectivity in favour of general and bland victimhood. The Swimmers rejects this lukewarm and people-pleasing approach often found in mainstream humanitarian discourse.

Yusra remains aware that her narrative is being taken control of and Sara leaves competitive swimming to volunteer on the front lines in Lesbos, Greece. This way, they both stand as a form of bottom-up resistance to the very structures claiming to help refugees, all while surveilling and disciplining them.

A central theme in The Swimmers is the tension between top-down humanitarianism and bottom-up mutual aid. While international institutions frame migration as a crisis that requires management, the film shows how real support comes from local volunteers and migrants themselves. During their journey, the sisters are helped by strangers more than any official body. The credits allude to Sara’s later arrest in real life for aiding refugees in Greece. This reveals the criminalization of solidarity under current border refugee regimes. This point is also discussed in FitzGerald and Arar’s analysis of the global refugee regime, where they argue that states increasingly treat mobility as a security issue, instead of a human rights one [4]. The refugee camp in Lesbos is overcrowded and militarized, making it a containment space, rather than a place of protection. This allows the film to visualize how migration governance operates similar to a border prison and not so much as a safety net for migrants. Individuals are stripped of agency and subjected to an endless cycle of bureaucratic inertia, immobilized by ongoing delays, and rendered dependent on the institutions meant to protect them.

The Swimmers is a nuanced, politically adapted film that interrogates the global inequalities behind displacement and the selective compassion of the Western world. El Hosaini’s film humanizes migrants without reducing them to victims, challenging dominant narratives and exposing the contradictions of refugee representation in the international spotlight. Yusra and Sara’s story is a unique cinematic portrayal where agency, resistance, and impartial appraisal are not sacrificed for performative empathy. Rather than only surviving the borders, the Mardini sisters confront and redefine them, turning displacement into defiance and performative visibility into resistance.