After directing and producing documentaries for the German TV channel ZDF on the refugee casualties of Middle Eastern wars that were dismissed as simply statistics, or producing images in news bulletins, Egyptian journalist Ali El Arabi decided to quit his job and live with the Syrian refugees in the Za’atari camp in order to get to know them closely and understand their needs.

“I felt guilty, so I wanted to shed light on their plight from their point of view and not from an external point of view,” El Arabi said at the last El Gouna Film Festival.

While he was filming with his crew, a teenager named Fawzi came to him and bombarded him with questions about the purpose of his filmmaking, his work, his world, and how people lived outside the camp. Fawzi’s curiosity piqued Ali’s interest. He spent time with Fawzi, in turn meeting the boy’s friend Mahmoud, with whom Fawzi spent his free time playing football. When the youngsters told El Arabi that they dreamed of professional football and achieving international stardom, he decided to put their story on film.

“They reminded me of myself when I was at their age in a small town in Egypt when I didn’t have any opportunities,” El Arabi says.  “I managed to get out of my circumstances and made my dreams come true, but their circumstances are much harder. They cannot get out of the camp. I was impressed by their determination to go far, even though they knew that it was almost impossible. So, I wanted to tell their coming-of-age story and follow their journey wherever it leads us, whether it is the world stage, Syria, or even whether it just stays within the camp.”

Thus began the documentary Captains of Za’atari, chronicling Mahmoud and Fawzi’s journey to realize their dream in the face of financial, societal and family challenges. In the first scenes of the film, Mahmoud is confronted with his father’s anger, the older man telling him that he should go to school instead of wasting his time on the football field. However, Mahmoud insists that studying will not help him in his struggles as a refugee. Meanwhile, Fawzi, when asked by his younger sister about his absence from school, responds that football will make him rich and famous, allowing him to buy gifts and bring back their father, who has been arrested and imprisoned in another camp.

Mahmoud and Fawzi are now young men in their twenties. They recall the time that football was their only escape from the bitter reality of the camp, both psychologically and physically.

“There is nothing in the camp but the playground,” says Mahmoud. “When we were playing, we used to forget the reality of the camp and feel like we got out of it, which gave us hope that we would actually get out of it one day.”

Ironically, despite Fawzi’s lack of school attendance, in the film, he devotes a lot of time to teaching his sister and punishes her whenever she makes mistakes.  “I realize that studying is very important, and I was outstanding in my studies in Syria,” he says. “But when I came to the camp, I was older than the school age, and they did not accept me. I don’t want my sister to lose the opportunity to be educated as I did.”

Mahmoud and Fawzi come close to realizing their dream of football success when a delegation from Qatar Aspire Academy visits their camp to assemble a Syrian soccer team for a teenagers’ international tournament. The academy selects Mahmoud, but despite their equal skill level, Fawzi is not chosen because he is a year older than the other boys. Both Mahmoud and Fawzi feel frustrated, but despite his disappointment, Fawzi encourages Mahmoud to travel to Qatar and not to worry about him.

“Those days were the saddest and most miserable of my life,” says Fawzi of the time immediately after Mahmoud had left. “Suddenly I was alone in the camp and didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t get into the house because my mom was reminding me that I had to find a job.”

But Fawzi’s distress did not last more than a week, because Mahmoud had succeeded in convincing Aspire Academy to make an exception. Academy officials returned to the camp to try out Fawzi again. “That moment was the happiest moment of my life,” says Fawzi. “Imagine suddenly going from poverty and playing soccer on the bare ground, to playing it on the soft grass of Qatar. I used to watch Aspire on TV, and suddenly I’m part of it.”

The twists in the story follow Fawzi and Mahmoud to Qatar and continue until the end of the film, allowing Captains of Za’atari to feel less like a documentary, and more like a feature film. The script delves into the depths of the lives of its two characters and deals with their close friendship, developing maturity, and the realization of their ambitions, presenting the events in a dramatic sequence that leads us in a swirl of emotions. Audiences were filled with laughter, tears, and even confusion as some viewers actually mistook the film for a fictional story and Mahmoud and Fawzi for exceptionally good actors.

“Even the professional actors who watched the film commented on the mastery of Fawzi and Mahmoud’s performance and praised my choice of them,” laughs El Arabi. “They never acted. They were living their lives with the camera recording it.”

“If people think we are professional actors, we are ready to get involved in the acting world. It’s a wish,” Fawzi laughs.

Nevertheless, some have suspected that El Arabi was directing his characters and events in order to achieve a solid dramatic storyline. He completely denies interfering in the events or directing his characters. “I have about 700 hours of video from six years of filming. The subject was rich, and having lots of material enabled us to connect the events together and arrange them in a dramatic way because we have footage on everything in their lives.

“The material is so abundant that we could make a dramatic TV series out of it,” explains the director who decided at the outset to make the film like a feature. “A documentary creates a barrier between it and the viewer because it deals with matters acoustically, while the feature breaks that barrier because its treatment is visual.”

El Arabi could easily have adapted the story of Fawzi and Mahmoud into a traditional feature film. He could have controlled events by writing a script and filming it within weeks, instead of investing six years of his life and – since life is by nature unpredictable – running the risk of possibly losing his main characters in unforeseen circumstances beyond his control. However, he refused to do so. “I did not want to present a feature story based on the truth, but rather I wanted to present the truth as it is, with its real events and its real characters,” he comments. “The authenticity of the events was more important to me than showing off my abilities as a director.”

In contrast to the Syrian documentaries that debuted after the outbreak of the war in Syria and revealed the crimes and tragedies that Syrians faced both inside and outside their country, Captains of Za’atari doesn’t play as either frustrating or heartbreaking. Rather the tone is inspiring and hopeful, despite its still depicting the same bitter and painful reality as the other films.

 “I visited many refugee camps around the world and met a lot of ambitious young people like Fawzi and Mahmoud, and this is what I wanted to highlight,” El Arabi says. “People think that a refugee just needs to eat and drink, but in reality, a refugee also needs someone to give him the opportunity to realize his dreams. If refugees were given opportunities, they would change the world.”

Mahmoud and Fawzi admit that they became more ambitious and more determined to achieve their dreams when they left their country in Syria and became refugees.  As Fawzi comments, “The suffering and limitations of asylum push you to find a way out in order to regain your freedom.”

Captains of Za’atari demonstrates that a refugee is not a weak human being, but rather one who is stronger than others. Asylum did not break these boys’ spirits. It strengthened their determination to achieve their dreams and ambitions. The film was praised by critics and has won many Arab and international awards since its world premiere at the US Sundance Film Festival, the most recent of which was the award for Best Arab Documentary Film at the El Gouna Film Festival.

Translation: Raffi Boghosian