'One in a Million': Syrian refugee tale wows Sundance

In Ismir, they met Isra'a, a then-11-year-old girl whose family had left Aleppo as bombs rained down on the city, and who would become the subject of their documentary "One In A Million," which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival on Friday.

For the next ten years, they followed her and her family's travels through Europe, towards Germany and a new life, where the opportunities and the challenges would almost tear her family apart.

There was "something about Isra'a that sort of felt to us like it encapsulated everything about what was happening there," MacInnes told an audience at the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah on Friday.

"The obvious vulnerability of her situation, especially as being a child going through this, but that at the same time, she was an agent.

"She wasn't sitting back, waiting for other people to save her. She was trying to fight, make her own way there."

The documentary mixes fly-on-the-wall footage with sit-down interviews that reveal Isra'a's changing relationship with Germany, with her religion, and with her father.

It is this evolution between father and daughter that provides the emotional backbone to the film, and through which tensions play out over their new-found freedoms in Europe -- something her father struggles to adjust to.

Isra'a, who by the end of the film is a married mother living in Germany, said watching her life on film in the Park City theatre was "beautiful."

And having documentarists follow her every step of the way as she grew had its upsides.

"I felt like this was something very special," she told the audience after the screening. "My friends thought I was famous; it made making friends easier and faster."
Search
Family is also at the center of Michal Marczak's beautifully-shot "Closure," which landed at Sundance on Friday.

The intensely cinematic documentary tells the story of a father's search for his teenage son, who vanished from a bridge over the Vistula River, Poland's longest water course.

Over 12 months, Marczak follows Daniel as he searches the river, using boats, underwater drones and hand tools, torn between the dread that he might find Chris' body and the desperate hope that he might be alive.

The river, at times hauntingly beautiful and others murky and unknowable, offers a mirror to Daniel's torment, and to the increasingly fragile hope of his wife, Agnieszka, that Chris will one day come home.

Daniel’s quest expands from the river into the digital world, as he tries to understand how a generation that seems constantly connected can sometimes feel so cut off.

His unrelenting river search lends him a degree of fame in Poland, and he is contacted by another father whose child is missing, eventually helping him to find her body.

Marczak said he had begun the film almost by accident, when he and his wife were rafting down the river thinking about a fiction project when they ran into trouble.

"We were trying to dock on this island, it got quite dangerous," he said.

"Then out of nowhere, this man appeared and he guided us to safety and that was Daniel.

"We spent the night together by the campfire, and he told us about why he's there. I saw the emotions and...I just couldn't stop thinking about it."

At that moment, he decided to abandon the feature project and make a documentary instead.

Sundance Film Festival runs until February 1.