I Was a Stranger
Cast of Characters:
Dr. Amira Homsi – Yasmine Al Massri
Mustafa – Yahya Mahayni
Marwan – Omar Sy
Fathi – Ziad Bakri
Stavros – Constantine Markoulakis
Jason Beghe – Dr. Kroft
Shaheen – Ayman Samman
Rasha Homsi – Massa Daoud
Director – Brandt Andersen
Writer – Brandt Andersen
Producer – Brandt Andersen, Ossama Bawardi, Ryan Busse & Charlie Endean
Distributor – Angel Studios
Running Time – 104 minutes
Rated PG-13 for strong violent content/bloody images, thematic material, a racial slur and smoking.
Amira Homsi (Yasmine Al Massri) is a Syrian doctor who flees Aleppo with her daughter Rasha (Massa Daoud) after war breaks out in her country. Mustafa (Yahya Mahayni) is a Syrian soldier who becomes disillusioned with his loyalty to dictator Bashar al-Assad when a recent military action crosses a line he can no longer defend. Fathi (Ziad Bakri) is a poet desperately seeking to get his family across the border and into a safe country. Marwan (Omar Sy) is a Turkish smuggler whose business in helping refugees escape seems to be more about profiting off their desperation instead of actually helping them. And Stavros (Constantine Markoulakis) is a Greek coast guard captain whose efforts to save said refugees begins to take a heavy toll on him.
As war rages on in Syria, these five individuals find themselves intersecting each other’s lives as they fight to survive.
I Was a Stranger opens with a tracking shot that follows the Chicago River all the way down to the Trump International Hotel. Soon after, a central refugee character enters the picture, walking right under the building’s shadow that looms large over her.
Well, looks like subtlety’s not the aim here, folks.
Subtle or not, the intro isn’t surprising given the film’s background, as writer/director Brandt Andersen, in his feature directorial debut, wrote this script following the president’s controversial 2017 laptop ban on flights coming from certain airports in the Middle East. Yet, while you’d be totally excused in bracing yourself for whatever left or right-wing politics you assume you’re about to be bludgeoned to death with, that’s not Andersen’s intentions here. Instead, Andersen simply wants to shine a light on the perilous experiences lived by refugees, many of which tragically end in death.
It’s evident Andersen’s intentions with this story are pure. I Was a Stranger features multiple storylines that should be told, and it comes so close to doing those stories justice. Yet it winds up being the most frustrating type of film: one that should be great, but ultimately settles for average.
I Was a Stranger utilizes a non-linear Rashomon narrative structure that bounces in between five individuals affected by the Syrian Civil War: the doctor, solider, poet, smuggler and captain. The film’s at its strongest through the doctor’s story, performed wonderfully by Yasmine Al Massri. As Amira, Al Massri provides a deeply empathetic portrayal that captures the doctor’s fear and vulnerability when faced with the harsh realities of her terrifying journey. But she also brings strength and resilience to her as well, most notably during her opening scene when she’s made a target by her country’s military for providing medical aid to the opposition and she resolutely responds that her responsibility is to care for the sick and wounded.
The conclusion to her story, which features some fairly effective sleight of hand in the storytelling, also highlights a heartbreaking reality that, for many refugees, their struggles still continue even long after they’ve escaped to safe ground.
Equally strong are Yahya Mahayni and Omar Sy as the soldier Mustafa and smuggler Marwan, respectively. Where Amira represents humanity’s compassion, Mustafa and Marwan represent its moral conflict. Mahayni effectively portrays Mustafa’s inner turmoil, beginning as a supportive participant in repressing Assad’s dissidents, which includes his own father, until the execution of a child hits his conscience like a cinder brick. Sy brings complexity to a man who profits off assisting refugees in traveling across sea from Turkey to Greece, yet displays a callous indifference toward their survival. His home life, however, reveals a man trying to care for his sick son, and it’s there that we see the tragic twist in his life he fails to realize. He’s essentially in the same boat as the very people he exploits.
Despite its strengths, though, I Was a Stranger finds itself hampered not so much by it’s non-linear narrative, but more so by how much its attempting to cover within that story. At just around 100 minutes, this film is barely over an hour and a half, yet it’s trying to tackle deep, weighty subjects all spread throughout five different viewpoints that, additionally, is bookended by its framing device in the U.S. That’s an ambitious venture, for sure, but in taking on so much in so little time and all within a format that, by design, is complicating, the film prevents itself from giving any meaningful development to its characters. Just when you’re starting to grab a hold of one story thread, it abruptly cuts to another, and so on and so on.
Again, it’s not the film’s structure that’s flawed. It’s the lack of depth in its story and characters, which is made all the more frustrating in that the different viewpoints – notably Amira, Mustafa and Marwan’s – contain fertile ground for rich development, yet the film remains content in keeping its focus only surface level. Most comic book films today average anywhere up to two and a half hours in length, so it wouldn’t have been that big of a crime to have added another 15-20 minutes just to flesh out everyone’s stories.
Also puzzling is Andersen’s decision to frame the big climactic rescue set piece around the captain’s perspective. For a character that feels so detached from everything else that has been going on, it’s a rather odd choice to conclude the story through his eyes, and not through one of the other viewpoints we’ve been following for most of the film.
Closing Statement: I Was a Stranger is well-acted and brings some thought-provoking ideas to the table, yet while its heart is in the right place, its underwritten back-and-forth narrative structure holds it back from delivering the compelling story these harrowing real-life situations truly deserve.
Silver Screen Fanatic’s Verdict: I give I Was a Stranger a C+ (★★½).
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