Filmed in five separate countries, this documentary follows, with ambitious scope and devastating intimacy, Syrian families displaced by war.
Megan Mylan’s latest documentary feature takes a humble idea — telling intimate and humanizing stories of Syrian families affected by their home country’s civil war — and achieves it on a nakedly ambitious scale. Filmed over five years in five separate countries, “Simple as Water” is anything but simple when it comes to its technical achievements, weaving together familiar immigrant narratives in ways that still manage to surprise and stun.
The film is book ended by vignettes featuring Yasmin, a mother of four living in a refugee camp near the dockyards of Athens, who is fighting to reunite her children with their father in Germany. Her story provides an optimistic through line for Mylan’s other subjects, who offer a much more devastating and uncertain look at the struggles of trying to build a new life in an unfamiliar place. In Turkey, a single mother with no time to care for her children attempts to take them to an orphanage, but her eldest son — a 12-year-old who has assumed the role of caretaker while she’s at work — steadfastly refuses to go.
In Pennsylvania, a delivery man named Omar applies for asylum for himself and his teenage brother. Through gradual reveals, we learn that Omar’s brother is not only an amputee, but that he appeared on CNN as a child after his leg was blown off in a Syrian rocket strike.
These stories avoid triteness by lingering on the daily, unassuming routines of their characters: after-school basketball games, a sunset walk through an orchard, the fashioning of a makeshift toy out of some string and a milk crate.
The level of access that Mylan and her team receive is remarkable on a personal front as well as a political one — a segment that takes place in Syria was shot with the help of two women from Damascus who are credited under pseudonyms. It’s one of the more contemplative moments in “Simple as Water,” bridging together Mylan’s ruminations on parenthood with the uncertainty of a nation’s future.
Simple as Water
Not rated. In Arabic and English, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 37 minutes. In theaters.
Source: Movies - nytimes.com
