Yusra Mardini's swim from survival to stardom

Words by Dalia Al-Dujaili.

Meeting Yusra Mardini, one gets the impression that the young swimmer was destined for greatness. I meet one half of the Mardini sisters in a hotel room in Soho and instantly, her confidence in addressing the most uncomfortable of questions and her overt passion for her homeland are unwavering. Yusra’s journey across land and sea from Syria to Germany with her sister Sara in 2016 is the subject of Netflix’s new film ‘The Swimmers’, with the sisters played by real-life Lebanese sister acting duo Nathalie and Manal Issa, and directed and co-written by Egyptian filmmaker Sally El-Hosaini. Having been approached by filmmakers before, Yusra always turned down the opportunity to make her life into a film; she tells me she was always more focused on her athletic career during Olympic training. But when Netflix approached her a few years on, she felt it was the right time to tell her family’s story.

At 17, Yusra and the then 20-year-old Sara decided to take the risk and leave their suburb of Darayya in Damascus, where they were living with their youngest sister Shahed, mother Mervat and father Ezzat, a former swimmer who coached the girls to swimming stardom in Syria. The sisters had both competed for their country at international competitions before the war broke out and Yusra was determined not to let conflict stand in the way of her dream to reach the Rio Olympics in 2016.

The sisters’ crossing, along with their cousin and many other refugees from the Global South, took them from Syria to Turkey, to the Greek island Lesbos, and through the Serbian and Hungarian borders, before finally reaching Berlin. On the now infamous crossing from Turkey to Lesbos, the engine on their dinghy boat stopped working and the sisters made the brave decision to jump into the water, guiding the dinghy to safety for several hours and saving the lives of everyone onboard. In 2016, Yusra’s prayers to compete in the Olympics were answered, and she joined the first ever Refugee Olympic Team in Rio.

“If you see the Arab world in the eyes of the media, it’s always destroyed. It’s always grey, there’s no beauty, and [for us] it was the complete opposite,” Yusra tells me. It was important to Sally El-Hosaini to tell a Syrian story informed by Syrians themselves for Western audiences. El-Hosaini knew exactly what was important for the Mardini sisters, Yusra tells me, and she portrayed the “sad reality of the bombs being shot on the other side of us whilst dancing and not being bothered by it,” the swimmer explains of an opening scene where the girls celebrate Yusra’s birthday during a bomb strike. “You see the beauty of Syria as well seeing that we were just trying to be normal teenagers, even in these rough times.”

‘The Swimmers’, Copyright © Netflix, 2022.

Despite no lack of talented, creative and intelligent individuals in the region, “sometimes we don't have the financial support to reach our goals and dreams,” Yusra says. As an Arab woman, she’s determined to change mainstream representations of Arab countries. “I did go for it and I did really work hard for my dreams and here I am speaking at the biggest stages in the world. So I really, really hope that is changing how people look at the Arabic-speaking world and know that we really did not choose to have war,” she says, noting little-known facts about her country, such as how “Syria had more tourists than Australia in 2012.”

Yusra, who is now the youngest UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, is hoping to affect refugee rights through more than simply telling her story on-screen or on the page. She tells me that despite her and her sisters’ hopeful and exceptional story, “there’s another story where refugees are not all happy. This is one percent of the stories of refugees”. There is another ‘99 percent’ of cases that Yusra and director Sally wanted people to know about, such as an Eritrean woman Yusra met on her journey who was refused asylum and pushed back to Eritrea by the UK.

And even Yusra’s ‘success story’ was not “always rainbows and butterflies” when she reached Germany. “Obviously I struggled and even if I was in a better place in the clubhouse [than the refugee hanger camp], I was still not fitting in,” she tells me. “I trained with a group that was younger than me. And I felt bad because I was slower than them.” Yusra and Sara’s cousin also struggled with homesickness, loneliness and a form of survivor’s guilt, as well as her parents who were able to join the girls much later on. “My parents have lived in Germany [for] five years and they’re still struggling with the language.”

Since joining UNHCR, Yusra has embarked on several awareness raising ventures, such as travelling to Jordan to spend time with other Syrians living in the Zaatari Refugee Camp to highlight on-the-ground refugee lives, rarely told by those who have themselves fled their countries. It’s also vital for Yusra to highlight women’s and girl’s stories, fuelled by her meeting with a group of young girls involved in an informal education and empowerment project at a UNHCR supported community centre in Zaatari. She tells me that her story would have been significantly different if it were two brothers – “I think the things we did were braver than what men did,” she says, a point highlighted in a scene where Yusra is subjected to sexual harassment by a refugee smuggler, a very common occurrence for women and girls seeking asylum.

As Yusra highlights, 40 percent of the film is in Arabic and with lead actresses from the Arabic world in a Netflix movie for Western audiences, it’s an almost unprecedented exposure to Syrian women’s lived experiences on a mainstream platform. El-Hosaini herself grew up in Cairo not so differently from the West and the version of Syrian teenage life we see in ‘The Swimmers’, so for once, Arab and Western audiences alike might find in Yusra’s and Sara’s story a startling relatability.

‘The Swimmers’ was released on 23rd November on Netflix.