(MENAFN- Gulf Times) At the close of a day, a tall man in an old suit jacket and trousers walks down a Mediterranean beach towards a girl of 5 or 6, who sits playing alone, by the water's edge. With a father's tender touch, he crouches down and braids her brown, wind-touslled hair. Dusting sand off her clothes, he takes her hand and leads her homeward. But passing a dock, he picks the child up and turns back, carrying her all the way down to its edge over the deep, murky sea. And then he hurls her in.
In the auditorium, movie-watchers gasped as the girl sputtered. The camera followed her underwater, being sucked down. She bobbed up again and cried for help but her father, with a stick in his hand, stayed put. The 13-minute film from Syria called Mare Nostrum (Our Sea, in Latin) was a prize finalist in the Manhattan Shorts film festival, which brings movies from around the world to audiences around the country. In this screening, it followed several horror films, making one wonder if the father was a Jekyll and Hyde character, capable of tenderness in one moment and homicide the next.
But Mare Nostrum, which won the festival's bronze medal, tells of a different kind of horror. It's an intimate look at a father's anguished calculations amid a backdrop of war.
The film haunted me for days after that screening and remains on my mind. Islamic State plans for a caliphate across the Middle East have collapsed, just like so many boats crammed with refugees have done in the six years since the start of Syria's civil war.
The brief, un-dialogued feature film didn't get into that, or the estimated 11mn Syrians who have fled their homes since 2011. Most relocated within the country and nearly 5mn went to Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt and other North African countries. It didn't get into the varying responses of nations where refuge was sought. It did what its director Rana Kazkaz, a Syrian who moved to Jordan with her writer and director husband after the war began, considers the beauty of what film can do: 'Get into the life and mind and emotions of human beings.
The drowning girl is saved that day by a passerby who jumps in. No explanation is offered for her father's actions. In bed that night, she lies shivering and sobbing under blankets while he lies awake with his back to her. The next day, back at the dock, he pushes her in again, but this time, she's clutching so hard to him that he's pulled underwater, too. It's clear he can't swim either; he grabs onto a post and flails and cries until she treads her way back to him and they climb to safety.
That night, she angrily spits into the dinner he serves.
The next day's end finds the father alone on the dock, crying. You assume the worst. Later that night, a long line of people is shown tromping in silence down a hill to the beach and then onto boats. They are refugees fleeing under cover of darkness. The man and his daughter are among them. Then a clip from an actual news broadcast tells of a little Syrian girl who survived the capsizing of a boat full of fleeing refugees.
It's not clear if any of the film is true or if the incident from the newscast was the same one reported in Britain's Daily Mail in June 2015, involving a 4-year-old Syrian refugee Sydrah Najib. She was rescued after five hours alone in the Mediterranean, inside the upturned hull of a boat. The story lends a possible rationale to why a father would subject his child to the harsh sea, with only a stick to grab for safety: He was preparing her to survive an actual event.
In real life, Sydrah and her family were among 70 Syrian refugees crammed on a boat intended for 25. They had left Turkey for Greece before dawn, the story said, to escape notice by Turkish authorities, fearing they'd be turned back. 'Sydrah's father broke down at the news - thanking God for saving his child - before she was whisked to the Ozel Bodrum Hospital, it said. 'She was treated for hypothermia and kept in hospital overnight, before being sent home with her parents.
It's easy to see refugees as a monolithic mass of misery and needs who dress, worship and speak differently from us, and who tax our resources when here. What we don't often get to see are the unique human beings who love their children, rescue strangers, have senses of humour, talent, courage, generosity and empathy. And who sometimes have to make harrowing calculations for their children's safety.
About a million Syrian refugees have been allowed into Europe to seek asylum while the US took in 18,007 between October 1, 2011, and December 31, 2016. The previous administration had planned an increase to 110,000 in fiscal year 2017, but the current one started out with an indefinite ban on anyone coming from Syria. That was later revised to a 120-day ban.
It's easy to conclude, given the demands of screening people, that there's not enough in it for us. But it's less easy once you've met some of the people up close, even onscreen, or seen some of the harrowing choices they're forced to make.
*Rekha Basu is a columnist for the Des Moines Register. Readers may send her e-mail at
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