Express At Marrakech: Sally El Hosaini’s The Swimmers is a harrowing, powerful story

And now in November, here I am at Marrakech, having just finished listening to him talk about his exceptional body of work, what got him into filmmaking (he began with shooting ski films at resorts), and how he has been sharpening his skills from 2004, when he made his debut with ‘A Guitar Mongloid’. He won his first top Cannes prize in 2017 with ‘The Square’, a savage take-down of the art world. With ‘Triangle Of Sadness’, he joins the exclusive club of such worthies as Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Haneke, Ken Loach, Emir Kusturica among others, who’ve won the Palme twice.

A Ruben Ostlund film is very much its own creature, blowing away the cobwebs that rest heavily on social constructs, and what makes it stand out from the rest of the top-flight filmmakers who work with the same themes, is the extent he can go to to unravel human hypocrisies. Ostlund takes no prisoners, and if you’re the squeamish sort (a whole section of ‘Triangle Of Sadness’ is dedicated to people barfing), he is not for you. Skin colour, race relations, the impossible standards set by the beauty industry which have permeated our social-media saturated world, the concept of shame, are all grist to the Ostlund mill, which likes it powders granular, a texture that sticks in your craw, refusing to let anything go down easy.

He’s been redefining arthouse cinema, especially one that comes from state-funded film-making centres in Europe. On long-haul flights, if we are all watching Adam Sandler movies, then we (people who work in arthouse cinema) are doing something wrong, he says. Nothing wrong with watching those movies, but it tells us that our films have to be both meaningful and entertaining. Growing up with a mother who teaches sociology gave him the tools to highlight the situation flawed people are grappling with. “For me there are no good guys or bad guys,” he says. “I’m not so interested in heroes, just humans.”

Some films, though, would never be made if there were no clear-cut heroes. Sally El Hosaini’s ‘The Swimmers’, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and which will stream on Netflix soon, tells the real-life story of two young sisters from war-torn Syria who make the arduous trek to freedom.

As Sarah and Yusra Mardini make their way across choppy seas (their damaged dinghy collapses, and they are tossed into the Mediterranean), they use their skills as trained swimmers to help the others in their group: one of the most affecting scenes is when they walk out on the Serbian shore, and see abandoned hundreds of life jackets, a testament to the people who were there before them. Their journey to Berlin is dotted with a series of sharks who steal their money, and leave them to the mercy of the refugee system, whose wheels grind ever slow.

You are able to ignore the film’s occasional flat, underlined patches because of its harrowing, powerful story. The ease between real-life sisters Nathalie and Manal Issa, who play Yusra and Sarah respectively, translates on to screen, and Yusra’s triumph at the Rio Olympics refugee team feels like a moment of real glory.