Many Syrian refugee children around the world don’t have access to a basic education, and this becomes a barrier to them growing up to be literate, self-sufficient, contributing members of their society.
Some refugees are living illegally in neighboring 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.
Mira is a Syrian-Canadian filmmaker who directed and produced the award-winning documentary Syria’s Tent Cities. She has an MFA in Documentary Filmmaking from the New York Film Academy in Los Angeles, California and works in pre-production, production and post-production. Mira has a strong interest in social issues. Throughout her Undergraduate schooling, she extensively researched a variety of controversial topics, including feminism and homosexuality in Islam, Jewish masculinities and gender identity and exploring ISIS and radicalization’s global impact. Her growing passion for social issues led Mira to choose to go on to study Documentary Filmmaking, where she created Syria’s Tent Cities, a film that explores the Syrian Refugee Crisis from both a local and global perspective. She is also working on a film that focuses on PCOS Disorder in women and how the many side effects it causes impact those affected by it. Through making her films, Mira’s experience has included interviewing social media celebrities such as Little Bear the Bearded Lady to experts in humanitarian matters, such as Bassam Khawaja who works in refugee issues at Human Rights Watch in Lebanon. In addition to filmmaking, Mira is very passionate about travel and hopes to be able to see the world through her work. Armed with her camera, Mira has travelled extensively for her projects and found many stories that she can’t wait to tell!
This film began as a thesis graduation project to earn my MFA in Documentary Filmmaking, and has since been developed into a short documentary 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 United States, who has seen the refugee situation on either side of the North American border, as well as in the Middle East itself.
During a visit to my home city of Toronto in August of 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 newcomer 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 lives prior to their resettlement in 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 in prior to coming to Canada didn’t prioritize 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 and during their resettlement in North America.