Premiering at Sundance, One in a Million pairs the sweeping story of refugee migration with a deeply personal portrait of a Syrian girl coming of age far from home.
This is one in a series of film reviews from the 2026 Sundance Film Festival, focused on films by women, trans or nonbinary directors that tell compelling stories about the lives of women and girls.
Winner of Sundance’s Audience Award in the World Cinema Documentary category, as well as the Directing Award for directors Itab Azzam and Jack MacInnes, One in a Million lives up to its title.
It homes in with a laser focus on the experiences of Israa, a Syrian girl whose family makes the difficult and perilous migration to Germany after the start of the Syrian civil war. By doing so, however, it tells a far bigger series of stories about forced migration, what it’s like to be a stranger in a foreign land, and the religious and cultural tensions of acculturating to a new nation.
“War,” adult Israa tells us at the beginning of the film, “is not the hardest thing a person can go through; it’s not as hard as what comes after.”
The film begins in 2025, when Israa returns to Saladin, Aleppo, to see the devastation left behind. But the real story of One in a Million starts in 2015, when the filmmakers meet Israa, then a personable and curious 11-year-old, and her family in Turkey where they await their chance to make the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean to Greece. Israa runs into the filmmakers as she is selling cigarettes on the street; she’s chatty and guileless, gamely showing them around the market.
The filmmakers manage to establish a remarkable rapport with Israa and her family from the outset, and her father Tarek shares his misgivings about the journey—even though, he says, after a shell hit the balcony of their Aleppo home, he knew it was time to leave.
The night they find smugglers for their sea journey, Tarek asks the filmmakers to share their story if they do not make it across alive. One of Israa’s brothers chimes in: How can they be afraid of some waves when bombs were dropping on them back in Syria?
One might think that the Mediterranean crossing and the weeks of walking through “five or six countries,” per Israa’s report, would occupy most of the film, but getting to Germany is only a sliver of the film’s drama. Of course, this part of the film, with snippets filmed on the family’s cell phones but mostly when the filmmakers caught up with them at various stages of the journey, has its harrowing moments: Israa’s footage and recounting of their overcrowded raft on the crossing; the family’s arrival in Greece, wet and shivering; walking for miles and miles on foot and sometimes sleeping on the street; and witnessing several children die from exposure after being stuck at a closed border in Croatia.
It’s once the family arrives in Germany and receives housing in Cologne—and the next nine years of their lives, which the filmmakers track through occasional check-ins and interviews—that tell a far more complicated and intimate story about the complexities of migration and acculturation, as well as the shifting tides of family life. (From 2015 to 2025, Germany had an open-door policy for refugees, providing asylum seekers with housing, education and other forms of assistance; since 2025, Germany has significantly tightened its immigration policies.)
Almost a year into their stay, Tarek expresses amazement when he stumbles across an anti-fascism protest in the street and marvels how protestors in Syria would have been beaten or jailed. Israa quickly learns to speak German and talks excitedly about the freedoms of democracy, vacillating in her decision about whether she wants to wear a headscarf or not.
Her mother, Nisreen also starts to come out of her shell. Back in Syria, she was uneducated and married off young, then bore four children. Even though fleeing from the war was hard, she says, she never felt free until she moved to Germany, where she hopes both she and her children can get the education she was denied.
Despite his initial excitement, as time passes, it’s Tarek who begins to chafe at the changes in his family, especially as Israa becomes a typical, impulsive teenager and rebels against the strictness of her over protective father. Nisreen, too, is increasingly no longer interested in ascribing to the traditional gender roles Tarek seems to expect of her, growing more and more confident and independent as the film progresses.
It’s these shifts, tensions and changes—some rewarding, some heartbreaking—in Israa and her family, that the film portrays with particular sensitivity and which are especially riveting.
For a filmmaker, what’s both wonderful and difficult about documenting real life is that you never know where the story will go. As a viewer, one of the pleasures of One in a Million is recognizing that a life (or a decade in a life) doesn’t need to have a moral, or a pat and simple narrative, to tell a transformative story.
As Israa grows from child to teenager to young adult, she’s the only one who can choose her path, decide who she wants to be, and determine where she’ll ultimately call home.
