Some refugees are living illegally in neighbouring countries, while others have been resettled permanently halfway across the world in Canada. This film examines the lives of the Syrian refugees on both sides of the globe, as they slowly improve their situation through the efforts of two individuals who have dedicated their lives to making education and inclusivity a right for all Syrian children.
I’m a Syrian-Canadian Director who graduated with an MFA in Documentary Filmmaking from the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles, California. I’ve always had a strong interest in social issues, which led me to choose a career in Documentary Filmmaking, where I created films that focused on matters such as PCOS Disorder in women and the Syrian Refugee Crisis.
This project began as a thesis graduation project to earn my MFA in Documentary Filmmaking, and has since been developed into a film that tells the complex story of the Syrian Refugee Crisis from both a local and global perspective.
Before making this film, I felt that I was in a distinctive position: a Syrian-Canadian living in the U.S., who has seen the refugee situation on either side of the border, as well as in the Middle East itself.
During a visit to Toronto in August 2016, I spoke to newly resettled Syrians whose children had just attended the first ever H.appi camp, a free summer camp experience exclusively for newly resettled refugee children. H.appi aimed to help these children integrate into Canadian society, improve their linguistic skills and aid them in overcoming the trauma that they had experienced before arriving to Canada.
I spoke with the refugees and asked them about their life before coming to Canada, and found out that most of them had lived in refugee camps; however, these camps were an entirely different experience to H.appi. The fundamental difference being that the camps these children lived at didn’t place any focus on education; they merely aimed to keep the inhabitants alive. Knowing that millions of children residing in refugee camps didn’t have access to a basic education, I knew that I had to tell this complex story from multiple perspectives, starting with refugees living in Jordan and Lebanon, consequently allowing the audience to gain a better understanding of the challenges that refugees have to overcome before being resettled in North America.