From Cool Runnings to Eddie the Eagle, films telling the stories of unlikely sporting heroes have often proven popular with audiences – and new Netflix movie The Swimmers very much fits into that genre.
Penned by director Sally El Hosaini alongside prolific screenwriter Jack Thorne, the film tells the story of two swimming sisters who dream of representing Syria at the Olympic Games until they are forced to flee their war-torn country.
Shining a light on the horrifying plight facing thousands of refugees around the globe, the film is much more than just a sporting underdog story – read on for everything you need to know about the true story.
The Swimmers true story
The film is based on the incredible true story of Olympian Yusra Mardini and her sister Sara, who left war-torn Syria in 2015 with the intention of seeking asylum in Germany.
Yusra and Sara were both aspiring Olympic swimmers, and their expertise came to the rescue when extremely perilous conditions in the Aegean Sea meant they had to heroically drag the boat which was carrying them and several other refugees to safety.
When they eventually arrived in Germany, Yusra was especially determined to continue chasing her Olympic dream, and with help from coach Sven Spannekrebs she ended up representing the IOC Refugee Olympic Team at the 2016 and 2020 Olympic Games.
Meanwhile, Sara decided to switch focus, and after leaving her swimming aspirations behind, she started volunteering in Greece to help refugees like her make safe passage across the sea.
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By and large, The Swimmers sticks very closely to the true story, with both Mardini sisters having been involved in the production – even though Yusra wasn’t initially interested in the idea of a film.
“I said, ‘Look, sorry, I’m not going to do this right now,’ but [producer] Ali Jaafar didn’t give up,” she explained. “We kept texting and saw films he had produced and thought he was a nice guy. Then the conversation started getting serious after we got the book [Butterfly: From Refugee to Olympian – My Story of Rescue, Hope, and Triumph] out in 2018 and we signed a deal with Working Title.”
Early on in the process, screenwriter Jack Thorne met with Yusra and her coach Sven so that they could tell him their story, but he quickly realised the film needed to have a stronger focus on the relationship between the two Mardini sisters, and so asked if he could be introduced to Sara as well.
“We sat in a room together [with Yusra and Sven] and they told the story, but the idea that it’s Yusra and Sven’s story felt like the wrong angle to me,” he said. “I didn’t know much about Syria or about being a refugee, but I do know an awful lot about being a sibling.
“And so I was like, ‘Who’s Sara and when can I meet her?’ I wanted to challenge the notion of what a refugee looks like, sounds like, and the more I got to know Yusra and Sara, the more it felt like a very noble relationship to me.”
The film opens by briefly showing what Yusra and Sara’s life had been like before the civil war broke out, and then jumps forward four years to show the destruction that was now part of their everyday lives – including a very near miss with a bomb.
That leads them to embark on the perilous journey to relative safety in Europe, with their journey seeing them come up against all sorts of challenging conditions.
Executive producer Tilly Coulson explained that the production “did a couple of trips to meet up with the sisters” to ensure these parts of the film felt appropriately authentic, explaining that “the research was really thorough, so it was a big help for Jack when he started approaching the first draft”.
When Sally El-Hosaini – who had previously only had a passing awareness of the Mardini sisters – was brought in as director, she was instantly excited to explore “the types of young women who live in the Middle East but never make it to our screens”.
“It’s not just the story of an underdog who has a dream and makes it to the Olympics,” she said. “It’s about a very obvious hero who becomes an Olympian but then also it’s about the unsung hero, the shadow sister, who doesn’t make it and yet goes on to do something just as heroic.”
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Meanwhile, Sara said that the knowledge that El-Hosaini was directing meant she “didn’t need to have as many conversations”, explaining: “She knows it. She experiences it, you can see it on her face and in her eyes when we talk about these things.”
El-Hosaini added: “I was able to bring an authenticity to Yusra and Sara, embedding the truths into it that I knew from growing up in Egypt, and the young women I knew, and maybe a little irreverence that others would maybe feel a little bit sensitive about.
“What I really like is the fact that we see their difficult sides, the jealousy, the competition between them and the really tough emotions, not just the palatable ones.”
Even further authenticity was given to the film by BAFTA-winning Syrian filmmaker Hassan Akkad, an associate producer who had navigated the same refugee journey as the Mardinis and could advise on the detail required to situate this film in the reality of Syrian life beyond the war-torn images, as well as the Arabic dialect specific to that region.
“[El-Hosaini] got in touch via DM on Twitter and said she wanted to collaborate to make it as authentic and as real as possible,” Akkad said. “Sally wanted the dialogue for any Arab to sound genuine, not to sound like someone used Google Translate. It had to come across as original, genuine and real, and Sally gave me the freedom to use words that Syrians use in their conversations.”
The Swimmers is streaming on Netflix now. Sign up for Netflix from £6.99 a month. Netflix is also available on Sky Glass and Virgin Media Stream.
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