NETFLIX FILM
“Ut doluptatem. Uptas dolut con cus sunt. Usapit dus estiunt.
Itatus magnisi ncient aut arcia dolore aute veria voluptatusti.”
Una XXXX, Editor, Belfast
The Swimmers. Cr. Laura Radford/Netflix © 2022
With the sports element, “we realised that there is a power in seeing those well-trodden paths of sports movies being walked by a young Arab woman refugee. It was a deliberate choice.”
The main characters being young, there was laughter and humour amid fear and sadness. “We wanted to keep that lightness whenever we could, without it being disrespectful.”
“The brief was to make this unifying for the audience,” says Kitching, “to make it an experience that
everyone will recognise.”
The music is consciously international. “We were bucking the trend again, not just for the sake of it, not to be controversial,” he says. Tracks from Beyonce and Madonna sit alongside music from young indie Arab artists, as well as a nod to an older generation.
Covid halted the shoot at its start, so The Swimmers was filmed with Covid restrictions. As El Hosaini travelled, Kitching would send rough cuts. “Because we’ve worked together for so long, she trusts me to put things together.”
GETTING THERE TOGETHER
At one point the refuges are walking along a railway track; an image of Yusra sleeping takes over the bottom of the screen. “It’s a very long dissolve, but I designed it so the top half of the image dissolves more quickly than the bottom half, leaving Yusra as a superimposition over the
landscape lying under the walking refugees for longer and creating that third image out of the two.”
When the story reaches Rio, archive footage from the 2016 Olympic Games is blended with original footage to give a sense of scale. With his background in documentary, Kitching pushed to include archive, as well as shots of the real Yusra.
The first assembly was put together in a week. It went down well. “At that point everyone thought we had something.”
Kitching pays credit to the whole crew, as well as his supportive family. “The team kept me sane…We felt like everyone was pulling in the same direction”
The acid test was Yusra and Sara’s response. “One of the things I was most happy about was that when we showed the film to the girls, they felt that it was like them. That brought a tear to my eye.”
Autumn 2022
televisual.com 153
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