Netflix, Working Title Begin Production on Sally El Hosaini s The Swimmers (EXCLUSIVE)
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Netflix and Working Title have started production on “The Swimmers,” directed by “My Brother the Devil” helmer Sally El Hosaini.
The film tells the true story of swimming sisters Yusra and Sarah Mardini’s journey as refugees from war-torn Syria all the way to the 2016 Rio Olympics.
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In 2015, after their house was destroyed in the Syrian Civil War, the Mardini sisters decided to flee the country. They made their way to Lebanon and then Turkey, where they arranged to be smuggled into Greece by dinghy. In the middle of the Aegean Sea, the motor of the dinghy, overcrowded with refugees, cut out, and the Mardini sisters and others who could swim, ensured the safety of the passengers.
Sally El Hosaini Starts Production On True-Life Tale The Swimmers empireonline.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from empireonline.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
My Brother The Devil, Sally El Hosaini rejected many of the directorial offers that followed.
It might be counter-intuitive to anyone who has spent years knocking on the notoriously hard-to-open door to the film industry, but El Hosaini has her reasons. For one, she was not a fan of the stereotypical subject matter she was receiving
– a lot of ISIS and honour killings.
“They saw I was a woman, they saw my name and they approached me with those stories that I didn’t want to do,” says
the Egyptian-Welsh filmmaker, during
Mena Arts UK and the Arab British Centre’s first Friday Hangout event, held last week over Zoom. “I want to be happy with what I put out in the world.”