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LONG DISTANCE SWIMMER

SARA MARDINI

Sara Mardini and her younger sister Yusra became Europe’s most celebrated refugee athletes when in 2016, they helped save the lives of 18 refugees crossing on a sinking dinghy from Turkey to Greece. But three years later, Sara is arrested for conducting search and rescue operations on the Greek island of Lesvos and accused of being a criminal mastermind. While her sister swims in the Olympics, Sara waits for a trial with no end in sight and a possible 20-year prison sentence.

Long Distance Swimmer: Sara Mardini follows 23-year-old Sara at a critical point in her life. An athlete who can no longer compete, a fighter caught in the metaphorical cage of a looming trial and the burden of others’ expectations, a survivor who always looks forward, not back. But her past is catching up with her.

The Mardini sisters were Syria’s elite swimmers and the nation’s hope for Olympic glory. But when civil war breaks out, their lives are upended, and they join the millions fleeing to Europe. While crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey to Greece, the engine of their overcrowded dinghy fails, and Sara and Yusra jump into the water, keeping the boat on course until they – and 18 other refugees – reach the safety of Lesvos Island.

Their story makes headlines around the world when Yusra joins the world’s first Refugee Olympic Team at the Rio Games in 2016, fulfilling a childhood dream they once shared. Later that year the sisters receive the Bambi Unsung Heroes Award and are celebrated by a Europe that stands with refugees. Their story is dramatized in a Netflix film called The Swimmers.

This documentary begins when the fictionalised drama ends. Unable to continue swimming, Sara returns to Lesvos as a search and rescue volunteer, helping other refugees brave the journey she once did. But the tides start to turn and in 2018 Sara’s humanitarian work ends abruptly when she is arrested and charged with several serious crimes, including human smuggling, money laundering and espionage. After more than three months in a high-security prison in Greece, she is released on bail and waits for a trial. If found guilty, she faces up to 20 years in prison.

Banned from Lesvos and waiting for news of the trial, she lives a surreal existence in Berlin. A student in a liberal arts college by day, escaping to techno clubs by night, and attempting to reconnect with her family after years apart. All this while her sister Yusra prepares for the Tokyo 2021 Olympics.

Shot over four years, the film follows Sara’s fight for freedom and illustrates Europe’s biggest shift of the last decade: from welcoming refugees to creating a hostile environment for those who dare to pull drowning people out of the water.

Feldman’s film succeeds in showing that the idealistic activist pays a high personal price for her humanitarian commitment. And the viewers are implicitly reminded that the moral duty to rescue and care for refugees in acute danger of their lives exists even if Europe does not want to grant them a permanent right of residence.
Kino-Zeit.de

This documentary tells their story and shows how sea rescue is criminalized.
Cinema Magazine

A quiet, but in its message powerful film (…) These are images we prefer to close our eyes to – but which also give us an insight into why people like Sara cannot stand idly by.
Oldenburger Nachrichten

“Sara Mardini” combines a very personal portrait with a fiery appeal against the criminalization of life savers.
filmdienst

The documentary impressively shows the madness of the criminalization of sea rescuers.
TAGESSPIEGEL

Director Charly Wai Feldman vividly shows what flight, fear, and despair mean. She depicts the loss of home and identity, shows the strength in fragility and the fragility in resilience. The humanitarian crisis at the gates of European coastal states becomes tangible, the political debates take on faces – and the question of the ways in which solidarity can constitute a crime could not be louder. “There is no more time for hope, there is time for action,” Mardini appeals. And thus, sums up the core message of this very touching and important film. 
choices

A film by
Charly Wai Feldman

Produced by
DOCDAYS Productions & Safe Passage Films

In Co-Production with SWR & Al Jazeera
in Association with arte

With Funds Awarded by
MOIN Film Fund Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein
Malik Bendjelloul Memorial Fund

Theatrical Distribution Mindjazz pictures
Sales Agent New Docs

Length 90 min
Release 2023

Sara Mardini and her younger sister Yusra became Europe’s most celebrated refugee athletes when in 2016, they helped save the lives of 18 refugees crossing on a sinking dinghy from Turkey to Greece. But three years later, Sara is arrested for conducting search and rescue operations on the Greek island of Lesvos and accused of being a criminal mastermind. While her sister swims in the Olympics, Sara waits for a trial with no end in sight and a possible 20-year prison sentence.

A film by
Charly Wai Feldman

Produced by
DOCDAYS Productions & Safe Passage Films

In Co-Production with SWR & Al Jazeera
in Association with arte

With Funds Awarded by
MOIN Film Fund Hamburg Schleswig-Holstein
Malik Bendjelloul Memorial Fund

Theatrical Distribution Mindjazz pictures
Sales Agent New Docs