AIFF2024: Wednesday: Omar Sy Plays A Smuggler Of Syrian Refugees

 There's just one picture on the schedule for tonight.  

E Street Theater

315 E Street, Anchorage, Alaska 99501

8:00 PM – 10:00 PM: Feature Narrative: The Stranger’s Case – Event Tickets

Whether you know Omar Sy from Lupin or Jurassic World or X-Men: Days of Future Past, you know this amazing French actor.  

And just a couple of days after Assad has been overthrown and has fled Damascus, we have this film about Syrian refugees.  

From Deadline: 

"Beloved French actor Omar Sy stars in the debut feature from longtime producer Brandt Andersen in The Strangers’ Case, a searing and international ensemble that is world premiering at the Berlin Film Festival on Friday. [That was last February]

Sy stars along with Yasmin Al Massri in the film, which is an extension of Andersen’s Oscar shortlisted 2020 short Refugee also starring Sy and Al Massri. It’s playing as a Berlinale Special Gala title later this week.

The film follows the chain reaction of events involving five different families in four different countries after tragedy strikes a Syrian family in Aleppo: a doctor (Al Massri) and her daughter, who come home following a chaotic shift at an Aleppo hospital; a soldier who witnesses heinous crimes towards men, women and children in the service of the Syrian regime; a smuggler in Turkey (Sy) who tries desperately to make ends meet for his young son while also trying to save enough money to afford his own escape; a poet from a Turkish refugee camp who barters for space on an overcrowded boat with his young family; and a Greek coast guard captain who spends his days and nights rescuing sinking lifeboats full of migrants."

From Guy Lodge, in Variety:

"The international scope and grueling human cost of the global refugee crisis lends itself to contemporary epic filmmaking of a particularly sober stripe, as seen mostly recently in Agnieszka Holland’s “Green Border” and Matteo Garrone’s Oscar-nominated “Io Capitano.” Shorn of their ripped-from-the-headlines urgency, such stories of humans crossing vast distances and facing hostile odds in pursuit of a better life are as old as time itself. A muscular, assured debut feature from U.S. producer-turned-director Brandt Andersen, “The Strangers’ Case” stresses the sprawling scale of the situation with a chaptered structure that pivots between multiple involved parties in the refugee’s journey, from warmongers to traffickers to rescuers to the displaced victims themselves. . .  

“The Strangers’ Case” is titled for a prescient, Shakespeare-written speech from the play “Sir Thomas More,” in defence of those displaced from their country and barred from others: “Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth?” Brandt’s debut hasn’t quite the Bard’s poetry, but the plaintive conscience is present and correct."