Educational Media Reviews Online

An impressive introduction to competitive swimmer and human rights activist Sara Mardini and her Olympian swimmer sister, Yusra. This film dilutes sometimes false dichotomies between mind and body and provides a truly empowering view of the best that flows from athleticism. Long Distance Swimmer shares the tale of these swimmers, one going on to be an Olympian in Rio and Tokyo, who back in 2015 pull an overloaded boat filled with refugees in flight, in a journey away from war-torn Syria and onward to safety at the Greek Isle of Lesbos. The sisters eventually gain asylum in Germany. As Syrian refugees having fled a bombed-out home near Damascus, their story spans several years that follow, throughout their lives in Germany and abroad. Settling into asylum, Sara will also endure a short prison sentence and a protracted subsequent probation spanning the running time of the film. She awaits a trial date and focuses on bolstering search and rescue operations undertaken by NGOs striving to help migrants avoid unnecessary deaths in their quests for safety and better lives.

While we watch sister Yusra compete on both the Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo summer Olympics as a swimmer on the Refugee Olympic Team, Long Distance Swimmer spends most of its time helping us get to know Sara and her grounded activism, together with the frustrations and precarious situations from which she has fled. Sara floats not just in water but above a frightening attempted redefinition by anti-immigration political forces in Greece and elsewhere that seeks to rebrand provision of life saving help for those adrift at sea as an act of criminal behavior. Long Distance Swimmer brings the viewer close up into Sara’s psychology and activism. At times, the film glosses over the actual events that undergird why she and her family attracted much attention in the first place. Because its two lead character sisters received a great deal of media coverage, to some extent the filmmaker assumes a little too much about what the viewer already knows. This does not suggest the personal narrative here should morph into a dry news report, but the filmmaking at hand may at moments be slightly too indirect about the life stories of Sara and her family.

Otherwise, Long Distance Swimmer is an impressive juxtaposition of the starkest of life and death circumstances with women evidencing tenacity as athletes, in college, and as young people who enjoy their youth in spite of savagery destroying their place of birth. Some of the sequences of Sara loving a swirl of pop music or chatting about her nightclubbing preferences and being enveloped in the bond with her fellow swimmer sister, remind us how at times these pleasures endure, even in the face of sharp persecution. As a symbol and setting of their flight to safety and athleticism, water is a representation of life in Long Distance Swimmer, creatively melding a story of the central role of competitive swimming into the non-athletic lives of these sisters, whose passions outside of warfare become a life-saving force.

The film is at its best when it does not impatiently cut away from our getting to know Sara and Yusra. A nervous home video aesthetic and choppy editing style in some segments may work at cross purposes with an intent of having us get more closely acquainted with those two young women. The treatment of some of Sara’s social media posts share authentic content, although can be visually off-putting given so much necessary on-screen redaction of personally identifiable information. Further evidence that the older medium of cinema is still figuring out how to best depict more recent intersections of social media with our lives.

Long Distance Swimmer is neither a scholarly nor journalistic report of migrant and refugee crises impacting the Middle East, North Africa and Europe as COVID-19 also thrashed the globe. However, students of the period and the topic of international migration in general, will appreciate this case study. It is a well-done vision of how athletic prowess at times translates into deeper forms of human service and human rights advocacy outside of athletic arenas. A metanarrative at play beneath the surface gives a viewer a contrast between competition and conflict, at times a precarious balancing act for interpersonal relations and within international affairs.

Some scholarly endeavors do not universally have the most comfortable of relationships with physicality or athleticism. Long Distance Swimmer is a strong counterpoint to those periodically unhelpful segregations between mind and body. Charly Wai Feldman spools out a perilous and still hope infused journey, one where fellow humans looking to care for those less privileged who confront displacement from their places of birth, come face to face with those human rights efforts being criminalized. Justice is rarely certain for the ever-steadfast Sara Mandini. Yet we have within Long Distance Swimmer, a bright poetic contemplation about human rights and freedom of movement, in and out of the water.

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