Ethical and editorial processes you have to go through before you can actually start filming her story

Yeah, I mean she was she was so confident and so ballsy and so defiant, you know it's easy to forget that she's an 11 year old girl and an incredibly vulnerable one at that and But, you know, the thing was, not only was she incredibly keen, I think it was something that really helped her through this process, that she would be almost like a guide to us through what refugees were going through.

But also, like, we had her father at her side the whole time.

He also saw it as a vehicle to tell his story.

And he was this kind of incredible sort of, you know... fascinating character but also this kind of brooding sort of patriarch and he became the sort of counterpoint for her in the film and um and you know as the as it went on through the journey we went with them and 15 of their family and and got to know them all really well and and and then of course we then had we then had 10 years in which they could you know constantly had the opportunity to reflect on you know whether this was something they wanted to do

And over time, how did the issues of consent change? change because she went, Israel goes from a child to a young woman.

Yeah, I mean, so it was sort of straightforward in the beginning because they were one family, two parents, both parents were behind it, she was behind it, there were no problems.

The story of the film, you know, spoiler alert, is that the family go through quite a lot of difficulties and they split up.

just she in and of herself and you throw in the family dynamics and the political situation, it's pretty damn remarkable.

Yeah, I think that is the heart of this film, really.

It's really a film about a family, you know, and a film about this one amazing girl at the heart of it.

And, you know, we started off wanting this to be a film about the Syrian predicament, the Syrian refugee crisis, but it really becomes so much more universal than that through her because she is just remarkable.

She was just brimming with positivity from that first moment, despite this enormous danger she was in.

People, you know, children were dying every day trying to get across from Turkey to Greece, you know, just in the weeks where we were filming her trying to get the last bit of money together to do it.

You know, famously, this child Aylan Kurdi was pictured, you know, washed up on a beach, you know, who was only a little bit younger than her.

Right.

Could you speak to the impact of those family sit downs and how your focus kind of changed as the relationships were changing?

Yes, I think you're referring to the interviews.

I think it was an idea quite early on when we were filming the journey to sort of make sense of what was happening by having a sort of clean space we could go into and just talk.

It felt like an important vehicle for Isra and her family to be the narrators of their own story.

And that was how it began.

But then as we sort of found ourselves in the edit 10 years after beginning this film, what we started to realize is that those interviews were full of really telling moments that weren't really narration.

They were scenes.

And I wanted to ask you as well, just all three of you, what is one element of this experience of this documentary that you hope audiences can take away with from watching this?

How did the family describe that crossing to you? Because we see a boat with way more people than should be on it.

there aren't really words for it.

It's the stuff of nightmares.

I mean, this is a family of 16 people.

There were, there were five young children amongst them and they're crammed in a, in a dinghy that is designed for 12 people.

And there was about 80 people in there and they were on the water for three and a half hours.

Um, they, uh, they had no sense of where they're going.

Right, Jack?