I Was a Stranger (2025)
Directed by: Brandt Andersen
Premise: An anthology of several overlapping stories set during the Syrian civil war. Families flee the carnage in Aleppo and pay smugglers to cross the sea into Greece.
What Works: Between 2011 and 2024, Syria was enveloped in a brutal civil war between rebels and loyalists of the government ruled by Bashar al-Assad. A humanitarian crisis ensued which resulted in a flood of refugees risking their lives by crossing the sea into Europe on flimsy lifeboats. I Was a Stranger is designed to put a human face on the refugee crisis and it does that effectively. The story is divided into chapters with each section focusing on a different person at a different phase in the journey, including a doctor and her daughter, a soldier who has deserted the Syrian military, a smuggler trafficking refugees, and a captain in the Greek Coast Guard. Segmenting the narrative allow the filmmakers to develop each set of characters and afford them some depth and complexity, much more so than we might get in a conventional narrative structure. I Was a Stranger benefits from that organization because the characterization and drama of each segment compounds; the film culminates with these people at sea struggling to survive and carrying with them the collective dramatic weight of their stories. I Was a Stranger manages to be brutal without feeling exploitative or unnecessarily cruel. The early segments depicting the Syrian civil war include some horrific violence but the filmmakers stage these scenes in ways that cut around the gore while emphasizing the emotional loss of life. It is very skilled filmmaking.
What Doesn’t: The stories of I Was a Stranger overlap and scenes at the beginning and end of the segments are sometimes repeated. The repetition is just redundant. We don’t get any new context that changes the meaning of the action and so this approach to the storytelling comes across a bit padded. As a story of the Syrian civil war, I Was a Stranger takes a broad approach at the cost of specificity. The film doesn’t illuminate anything unique about the Syrian civil war. It’s a bit generic. The story could be set in almost any region experiencing a civil war and play more or less the same. I Was a Stranger effectively dramatizes the chaos and brutality of war and the risks taken by refugees but it doesn’t reveal much about the conflict itself or new ways of thinking about it.
Bottom Line: I Was a Stranger puts a human face on the Syrian refugee crisis. It may not tell us much about that conflict but the film does illustrate the human stakes of this catastrophe.
Episode: #1083 (January 18, 2026)