The Impact of War on Syrian Families

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR: And far from offending, “Raise is Roof” is really fantastic. Now, more on refugees and what the U.N. calls the largest displacement crisis in the world. “Simple as Water” is a new documentary that follows five Syrian families who are attempting to navigate asylum and civil war. Academy award-winning director, Megan Mylan, tells Hari Sreenivasan about her project which examines the complex family bonds in a world of uncertainty and separation.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Christiane, thanks. Megan Mylan, thanks for joining us. This documentary five years, five countries, five families. How did you decide that this is the way that you wanted to look at the Syrian refugee crisis?

MEGAN MYLAN, DIRECTOR, “SIMPLE AS WATER”: Back in 2016 when the crisis has really gotten very intense and there was the flow of refugees across the Mediterranean, I was the mother of a three-year-old and I was pulled into this story, really, as a human being and not as a filmmaker. I was waking up every morning just reading and watching and sort of unable to reconcile how as an international community we were allowing people who had managed to get themselves out of war zones to have to negotiate with smugglers to get to safety and to get to a place their families could thrive. And so, it was — it took me a while before I decided that I actually had something to say as a filmmaker. And — but it was that sort of primal and universal instinct of parenthood that felt like my point of entry. I had made a film a couple of decades ago called “Lost Boys of Sudan” that was also a refugee story. It was a journey story about two young men coming to America. But I had — you know, especially through making of the film and then, also traveling with it afterwards and learning, this is such a multidimensional story that doing the journey of one family for the scale of what was happening felt the meaning. So, I landed on this vignetted chapter structure that the film has, it’s five individual stories that don’t intercut. I also didn’t want it to have sort of a longitude year in the life feel to it because I felt like it’s something that doesn’t have meat resolutions, so the structure is trying to echo that. We joined the families for a moment in time. You know, we selected families that give us insight and then many of the layers of the family experience in foreign displacement.

SREENIVASAN: One of the clips that I want to play is a conversation that a woman is having at an orphanage. Let’s take a look.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Welcome. Tell me about your situation.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): I have five children, and I’m here to register them at the orphanage. But my eldest son doesn’t want to.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): So, you have five children. You eldest (INAUDIBLE).

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Fayez.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Fayez. How old is he?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): 12 years old.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): 12 years old.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Tell me about your family’s situation before you come to Turkey?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): We (INAUDIBLE). My husband did business with the regime. And ultimately, they took him. They arrested him. And we haven’t seen him ever since. We had a happy life before then. Every time I look at my kids, I remember the good life they had. I’m afraid for them.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Why do you think it’s best to register them here now?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Because I can’t support them.

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SREENIVASAN: Even in that tiny little clip, we see absolutely an excruciating choice that that mother has had to arrive at. And tell us a little bit more about how she got to that place where she doesn’t feel she can support him anymore. What else has she been doing?

MYLAN: Yes. So, the woman we just saw, Samara (ph), and she’s speaking with Mayada (ph) who is one of the social workers at (INAUDIBLE), a center on the Syria-Turkey border. Samara’s (ph) husband, as she says in the clip, was — disappeared, was taken by the regime. They assume he’s lost. But they don’t know. She has five boys, ages 12 down to infants. But she’s a single mom now and she’s, you know, tasked with keeping them safe and fed and, you know, joyful and looking forward and educated. And it’s too much. She’s not — she doesn’t — she leaves for work at 4:00 in the morning. She doesn’t feel safe when they’re there alone and, you know, knows that her eldest, Fayez, who you meet in the film, is being robbed of his childhood because deciding the take on the role of father. And, you know, that was one of the through lines we were looking for and what war and displacement does to children is that they take on these very adult responsibilities and sacrifice their own childhood. And so, you know, obviously, she wants to keep her children with her but she feels like she has no other choices. And so, one of the things we were looking for is, you know, ways to help audiences understand the really excruciating impossible choices that parents are forced to make if they don’t have the support once they’ve gotten to physical safety. And that’s what we see with Samara (ph). And her son doesn’t want to go. And that’s sort of the dilemma of that chapter.

SREENIVASAN: Let’s take a closer look at Fayez, the 12-year-old they’re talking about.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Sit down. What makes you say that, when this could like your home?

FAYEZ (through translator): Home is better for my soul. My mother is there.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): I understand you want to be with your mother, but don’t you want to go to school?

FAYEZ (through translator): It’s too much. I lost my father, I don’t wat to lost my mother, too.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): But what if your mother is close by, and can give you all her love, warmth and attention?

FAYEZ (through translator): Miss, it’s better for us to stay with our mother.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): When you mother is away at work, during those hours, do you feel burdened taking care of your younger siblings? Don’t you want someone to help you with this task?

FAYEZ (through translator): No. I can manage alone. I want to be their father. I want to be everything to them.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): If you want to be their father and everything to them, shouldn’t you be well prepared for that?

FAYEZ (through translator): Yes, miss, but —

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Right?

FAYEZ (through translator): Miss, I don’t want them to feel they’ve lost our dad.

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SREENIVASAN: You know what it’s interesting is that Fayez — it’s not that he doesn’t want to go because he’s a child. His rationale for it is absolutely the opposite. I mean, he’s speaking as a grown man who feels like his role is to basically father his siblings because he doesn’t — I think he says explicitly, I don’t want them to feel another loss.

MYLAN: Exactly. And, you know, one of the things I kept with — when I would get the translation back, I kept pushing back with the translators and saying, this sounds too formal. He doesn’t sound like a 12-year-old. Can you do another pass on it, you know? And they kept saying, no, this is exactly what he’s saying. He speaks like an adult. So, yes, he very much saw himself as the caretaker and his singular mission was to avoid any more heartbreak for his siblings and himself and his mother. I mean, and it was — you know, it was a hard decision on her too that their — you know, there — and there — I think this is what we were trying to get to is their choices that they’re — where there’s no right answer and no wrong answer. People who see the film and think, how could she have considered this? And others think, how could she not? So, you know, and that’s the world we’re living in, right, where folks are faced without correct decisions, without good options.

SREENIVASAN: And one of the through lines that, really, in a way, Fayez, represents in this particular story, but also the role of boys and the role of men in these families that are all dealing with their own different ties of loss and grief and trauma.

MYLAN: Yes. Every family in the film has lost something vital, you know, whether it’s a home, a spouse, a parent, a limb, and are determined to move forward despite that. It was really important to me to have both. We have storylines where older brothers are taking on the parental role both in Turkey and in our U.S. chapter. But then also, a storyline of fathers in Germany. And that was one I felt like had so much resonance to with folks who come to our country. You know, men from Central America and Mexico, and the best way they can serve their family is parking themselves in a more affluent country. And basically, that’s what these Syrian fathers were left to do. They have gone ahead first to make sure that the route was safe. Which, of course, it wasn’t. But they made it through first. Imagining that they’d be able to bring our families quickly. And then, border policies, borders closed down and they’re stuck, separated for years at a time. But still, they know the best way they can — or often decide the best way to serve their family is waiting to be reconciled, to be reunited. And so, you know, especially, there are many cultures that, particularly in Syria, dads are hands on, physical, affectionate fathers. And so, to watch these men miss milestone after milestone and their children not to benefit from their proximity was really difficult to be next to and one that we felt was really, really important. Some of the scenes that we — and conversations from each story sort of centers around very intimate family conversations. In Germany, it was a group of fathers who were all sort of living in a dorm-like setting together and it felt privileged to me. I was often the only woman in the room. And to hear men talking about fatherhood and their feelings of shame of having gotten to the safest and most affluent place and not having been able to bring their families with them was something I won’t forget.

SREENIVASAN: You talk about a father that you meet in Germany and then, you actually — you start the film with that father’s family who is kind of stuck in this perpetual limbo. I want to play a clip from a conversation that mother is having with one of her daughters.

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UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): There’s no war there. And no airstrikes. Didn’t he tell you that.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Yes. Where does dad live in Germany?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Your dad lives in a very big house.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): With what?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): He lives with other guys. They cook together and eat together. And they sit and spend time together.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): If we go there, we will with them?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): No. We’ll get a house and live on our own.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): How many times did dad try until he made it?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Your dad made it on his first try. But he went in summer. There was no rain or wind.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Did they have children with them?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Yes, but not many.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): There were 12 children on our boat. How many times did we try to get on the boat?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): Seven times. We succeeded on our seventh try.

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE (through translator): I only remember the last time.

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SREENIVASAN: That scene to me is partly just gut wrenching because what these families are just trying to suppress and cope with — in their personal tragedies as they try to live some sort of a daily-ish, normal-ish life while they’re stuck literally on a port in Greece

MYLAN: Yasmeen (ph) is the mother you see in that scene and, Fatan (ph), her daughter who’s now a teenager, you know, films take a long time to edit. But I was — you know, I feel like each parent in the film copes differently. Never know how you’re going to react to the situation, right, until you’re in it. Yasmeen (ph) seemed so determined to make life good again. So, she was constantly talking forward and the future and when we are in Germany, when we are able to go back to Syria, which is, of course, what most refugees and the ones — the families we spent time with want. When we’re with grandma and grandpa again, you know. And also, just determined that there would be joy in the everyday. The film opens with them sort of dancing with balloons. And when we were there filming, you know, it’s also an industrial port in traffic and she was like mother bird watching them. You know, she knew where they were every second. She knew where it was safe for them to be and where it wasn’t. But wasn’t holding on to them. She was, you know, encouraging, go out. They go to the seashore, you know, the side and she’s encouraging them to be brave. And one of my earliest research called on this was with a Syrian woman who is now living in Tyrone (ph), she said, you have to understand, of course, survival is step one, but everyone wants to thrive. They want good bold lives again. And we tried, in the film, to give a sense of people and families that had been mid stride before this upheaval that had all the same aspirations and expectations of their future that you and I do. Plans for college and retirement and weddings and — you know, and that was just rips. I mean, as — you know, when I think about how the pandemic descended on all of us and we’re like, wait a second. Everything I knew just stopped? That’s really the experience when war descends on you or when, you know, climate crisis descends. Everything you planned, you know, has changed.

SREENIVASAN: There’s something universal about this notion of dreams deferred, of life on hold. Whether it’s these families from Syria or now, migrants that are on the border with Poland or the refugees from Haiti or Mexico or South America or Central America that on our southern border, all of them, millions are going through this and the way that climate change is affecting the planet, there are likely millions more that will.

MYLAN: Absolutely. I mean, when I made “Lost Boys in Sudan” 20 years ago there were about 40 million people displaced. And now, we’re at 82, according to the U.N. So, it’s doubled in 20 years’ time and there’s no reason, unless we do something radically different with how we deal with conflict and climate, this is our present and our future and I think, you know, the question that I hope people get in a very sort of emotional way through the film, just like sort of organic way is that, you know, the question really is how we deal with that. So, how do we embrace people? Do we — are we going to offer individuals and families who escape conflict? Are we going to offer safe passage or leave them to negotiate with smugglers? Are we going to, with moral urgency, reunite families or leave them separated for years at a time to navigate bureaucracy? Are we going to insist that children are enrolled in school regardless of what the eventual country of asylum that was — you know, with the family in Greece, the kids could then enroll in school in Greece because they were seeking asylum in Germany. Well, they missed two years of school. Like, you’re only a seven-year-old, you’re only eight- year-old once.

SREENIVASAN: One of the things that struck me when I was watching this was how long we have been talking about what is happening because of Syria and the Syrian regime and the migration and all of the forms that it’s taken. It’s been 10 years and we are still talking about this. And it only seems like there are these blips there, these moments. Oh, there was, you know, gas attacks. Oh, there was this child that washed up on a beach. There — I don’t know how to sustain the level of interest that’s necessary as kind of humanity to try to solve this.

MYLAN: When things don’t — you know, when problems are complex and things don’t change quickly, people sort of throw up their hands. And, you know, the Assad regime has not stopped being corrupt and a source of fear and evil and yet, they’re being normalized. You know, he’s been normalized as a leader because I think people don’t see alternatives. And I don’t — you know, I don’t know what the answer to that is other than I feel like we have to do better. People have to be held to account if we want to live in a world where, you know, families aren’t forced to flee for just basic safety and freedom, then we have to hold governments to account even when it’s complex, even when it takes decades. So, you know, the question of the detained in Syria is unresolved. You know, hospitals are still being bombed. Six million Syrians are still, you know, forcibly away from their homes with really no safety and nothing to go back to. I think it is that thing that we were touching on before that this is very specific to Syria but this is the reality we live in and this is very likely is our future that millions of people will continue to flee.

SREENIVASAN: Well, it is an incredibly intimate film. The documentary is called “Simple as Water.” It’s available on HBO and HBO Max. Megan Mylan, thanks so much for your time.

MELVIN: Thank you, Hari, a pleasure.