I was a refugee as a child, towed along by family as we escaped war in Sri Lanka. My memory of the whole ordeal is vague. There were stops that lasted weeks and months, as we were left in limbo in Hong Kong, Tokyo and Vancouver, before finding a home in Toronto.
You meet a lot of people throughout such journeys, fellow migrants you live with for a time at refugee camps or shared apartments. They come in and out, leaving behind disjointed and scattered stories, memories of transit without a beginning or end. Simple As Water, a mosaic-like HBO documentary about Syrian refugees, affectively evokes that sensation.
Megan Mylan’s film gently breathes in the scope of the Syrian refugee crisis by moving from family to family who are landed or stranded temporarily in places like Greece, Turkey and the United States. Like a collection of short stories, the film spends a little bit of time with each family, focusing on the protective bond between parents and their children, capturing fragments of their lives before moving on to the next.
“It’s not a cohesive or linear experience,” Mylan tells the Guardian on a Zoom call from her New York apartment. “It’s constant upheaval and repositioning. I wanted the film structure to echo the reality of the people in it and not give a tidiness that wasn’t true to that experience.”
Mylan is the Oscar-winning film-maker behind Smile Pinki and Lost Boys of Sudan. The latter film, which she co-directed with Jon Shenk, was a story about young refugees making the journey to the US and acclimatizing to their new home. That experience documenting a migration story didn’t immediately compel Mylan to make a film about the Syrian refugee crisis. She considered for a time that she may have exhausted everything she could say on the matter.
But she followed the news attentively: the headlines and footage of migrants crossing barbed wire or riding on smuggler boats from Turkey to Greece. She was latching onto images of parents cradling their children during these perilous journeys. Mylan has a child who was three years old as the crisis was unfolding. “As a newish mother, it was so primal,” she says. “The way I was experiencing the world was all through his eyes; both its joys and its injustices. And I just kept thinking, what would I do in that situation?”
And like so many people in the western world, Mylan stood to attention when she saw devastating photos of Alan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian boy whose lifeless body washed ashore in Turkey, after the inflatable boat his family boarded to get to Greece capsized. “I remember that morning I had also taught my son to close the Velcro ties on his shoes. And that little boy had socks and little Velcro closures. Someone put those socks and shoes on him. His father had survived. I just kept thinking of that pain of having not been able to protect. It felt like a valid point of entry that I hadn’t seen.”
Simple As Water gathers a diverse set of parents, or parental figures, and the people they look after, like Yasmin who lives in a portside refugee encampment in Athens with her four kids while coping with the “Kafkaesque” bureaucracy of transit. Her husband, Safwan, escaped separately to Germany, spending years in touch with his family strictly through iPhone. Samra works as a field hand in Turkey while her 12-year-old son steps up to become the man of the house, taking care of his four siblings. Omar works as an appliance delivery man in Pennsylvania trying to secure a future for his kid brother, an amputee named Abdulrahman. You might have seen the latter on CNN as an 11-year-old, recalling the rocket blast in Syria that claimed his leg.
Diaa’s story stands apart from the rest. The elderly mother remains in Syria, after half the population fled. She affectionately takes care of a grown, developmentally delayed son, while worrying over another son who – as we learn through drips of information – has been disappeared. Her life, captured with an anonymous crew in Syria, is a different kind of purgatory. Living under the assumption that her son was abducted by Isis, she scans Facebook pages and makes WhatsApp calls, trying to learn his fate.
There are details to this story that I only learn from Mylan. The missing son was a citizen journalist. Most would assume he was abducted by Bashar al-Assad’s regime, which was the more common narrative at the time. But witnesses saw him and his girlfriend taken from their cars by men who they thought appeared more like Isis.
We don’t hear these things in the film because the film-makers never compel their subjects to explain or narrate for the audience. They opted instead for an unobtrusive fly-on-the-wall approach, an observational style where the people in the documentary choose what they want to reveal at any given moment.
Mylan says the film has “the scaffolding of journalism”, but is guided by humanity. “We wanted to get the right stuff on the screen. But we wanted to get to it the right way, too.” And in Diaa’s case, the withheld details don’t take away from a story about a mother overcome by a “terrifying helplessness” not knowing her son’s fate.
The unobtrusive approach and spare details are heartbreakingly effective in Yasmin and Safwan’s story. They have four children. We slowly gather that there was a fifth: a young child seen briefly as the remaining kids watch old home videos on a phone. His fate is never explained. All we learn is that he’s gone. The film-makers never coax an explanation for the camera. Mylan knows that an audience would immediately fill in the gaps with everything we know about the Syrian refugee crisis, whether we learned it from previous documentaries, news footage or those galvanizing photos of Alan Kurdi. “If you’ve had your ears open at all – and if you’re going to come to this film, you likely have – we felt like we didn’t have to do all of that ‘catch you up’.”
“Part of what I love about documentary is the puzzle of it,” Mylan adds. “Here’s what they chose to give me. Here are the layers of their experience that they shared. And together with my editor, I have to figure out how to piece that together to give you enough that you feel like you understand.”
Simple As Water is now available on HBO and HBO Max with a UK date to be announced
