Real-Life Sisters Play Syrian Refugees Yusra & Sara Mardini In 'The Swimmers'
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Netflix just dropped a new movie that dives into the difficult journey of sisters Yusra and Sara Mardini, Syrian refugees who left Damascus, Syria in 2015, and ended up swimming from the middle of the Aegean Sea to Germany.
The Swimmers explores how the Mardini sisters arrived in Germany and lived in a refugee center. The girls ended up reaching out to the nearby swim club, per The Guardian. From there, Yusra was able to train on the new refugee team for the 2016 Olympics in Rio and even won one of her heats.
Now, Yusra is 24 and Sara is 27. But if you've got more questions about these two sisters and their incredible journey, don't worry, Women's Health has all the details. Read on for more information about the film, who plays the sisters in the movie, and where the real life sisters are today.
They grew up swimming.
The Mardini family—including Sarah, Yusra, their little sister Shaed, their mother Mervat, a physiotherapist, and their father and swim coach, Ezzat—lived in Daraya, a suburb of Damascus, Syria, according to The Guardian. They swam at their local pool during their formative years, with Yusra going on to compete for Syria in Dubai and Turkey in the world championships.
“We had had a leadership role since we were young, we were taught how to be winners, to lead, to come up with ideas out of nowhere,” Yusra told The Guardian.
They continued their training until the Syrian civil war, which broke out in March 2011, made their life in Syria very dangerous. The fighting and bombing resulted in their house being destroyed, and Ezzat, the girls' father, was taken away and tortured after being mistaken for someone else. When an unexploded bomb landed in the pool where Yusra trained, Sara realized that they needed to leave.
In August of 2015, their parents decided to send them to Europe.
They literally swam for their lives.
The sisters packed into a small rubber boat to try to reach Europe from the Turkish Coast. The boat could only fit seven people, but they squeezed in 18 other refugees, per The Guardian.
When the group was halfway through the Aegean Sea, the motor stalled and water began to pour into the boat, The UN Refugee Agency says. Sara, Yusra and two others jumped into the sea, swimming beside the boat for three hours in very cold water, per Olympics.
Not only did the boat arrive safely on the Greek island of Lesbos, but all of the passengers lived.
The sisters continued to train after escaping Syria.
After making their way to Germany, the sisters met Sven Spannenkrebs, a coach at a swim club near their refugee center. Sven let the girls train at the club, and even helped Yusra secure a spot on the IOC Refugee Olympic Team for the 2016 Olympics. He continued to train Yusra until 2018, per The Cinemaholic.
Sven now lives in Germany and is part of the Special Olympics World Games Berlin 2023 team, the outlet said, and he also works with a project that helps to integrate refugees into the job market and "tackle the shortage of skilled staff in swimming" in Germany.
Yusra competed at the Rio Olympics.
In Brazil, she went on to win her 100m butterfly heat, ranking 41st out of 45 entrants, per Olympics. From there, she traveled, met other refugees, educated people on her experience, got a management team to rep her, and ghostwrote her 2018 autobiography, Butterfly: From Refugee to Olympian, My Story of Rescue, Hope and Triumph.
She didn't win any medals, however.
Yusra and Sara were involved in the making of the film.
After being approached by freelance producer Ali Jaafar, Yusra finally agreed to a film. The Swimmers was made by Working Title, the company that is also responsible for big titles like Love Actually and Bridget Jones’s Diary. It was directed by Sally El Hosaini.
How accurate is the film?
For the most part, the story stays true to what happened IRL. “A lot of research was conducted with Yusra and Sara’s family," El Hosaini told Forbes. “Predominantly we stuck to the truth, but there were times when fictionalizations were made—but they were always made to allow us to honor the larger refugee story.”
Producers priority authenticity, down to having actual refugees work on the movie, too. “We actually cast a lot of refugees in the movie who had taken the same journey themselves and there were refugees working on the film behind the scenes and all of that helped to make sure that we were telling the story the right way,” she added.
The film covers everything.
The Guardian says that the scenes show the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of the sisters' journey. For one, it shows the scene where their boat is sinking. It also apparently shows Yusra’s sexual assault by a trafficker, the immigration lines, and scenes of the two dancing in a nightclub.
The movie also shows that Yusra’s success wasn’t super easy on Sara and affected their relationship. “The goal of this movie is way bigger than my story,” Yusra told The Guardian. “We want it to make an impact on the world.”
They’re played by real life sisters.
Yusra and Sara will be played by Lebanese sisters, actors Nathalie and Manal Issa, respectively.
Manal was originally auditioning for the role of Sara and mentioned that she had a little sister Nathalie, who wasn’t an actress, but was studying literature, per Forbes. El Hosaini invited them to do a screen test together.
“When I saw them together, their chemistry was so undeniable and they felt so right as the Mardini sisters,” El Hosaini told Forbes. “It was a no-brainer for me.”
Ironically, the Issa sisters didn’t know how to swim when they were cast, but Sven actually gave Nathalie some of her very first swim lessons.
Yusra is actually her own stunt double in the film.
Even though she was training to swim in the Tokyo Olympics at the time, Yusra still made time to help shoot the swimming pool portions, per Forbes.
“Sara and I, we have been creative since we were young,” Yusra told The Guardian. “It’s the same with Nathalie and Manal. That was the beauty of it because they come from a similar background, they knew exactly what we went through as girls. That’s what made it so amazing.”
Where are the sisters now?
Sara loved swimming, but she quit once she reached Germany because of a shoulder injury that hurt her emotional and physical health. In 2018, she was arrested while doing refugee activism in Lesbos, charged with spying, smuggling, and belonging to a criminal organization, and kept in jail for three months, per The Guardian.
Amnesty International has since said the charges are “trumped up” and “farcical,” but she still faces a possible sentence of 25 years in prison. A small clip during the closing credits will cover the arrest.
Yusra currently lives in Berlin, per The Guardian, but she goes to college at the University of Southern California as a Film and Television Production Major. Today, she has 360,000 Instagram followers and is still swimming. She qualified for the Syrian team for the 2020 Tokyo Olympics but opted to swim on the refugee team, which she joined again for the 2022 FINA World Championships in Budapest, the outlet said. Yusra is now a German citizen.
Yusra has also dedicated to working in activism on the rights of refugees. She’s even launching a charitable foundation in Germany and the US to help educate refugees through sports. “I always represent Syria in everything I do, but refugee is my identity now,” she said.
The Swimmers is streaming now on Netflix.
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