I Was a Stranger

Aleppo, during the war. A doctor and her young daughter decide they have no choice but to flee. Their journey sets off a chain that connects five strangers across Syria, Turkey and the Aegean: a soldier in the regime's army, a smuggler who makes his living from desperate people, a poet trying to save his family, and a Greek coast guard captain who pulls the living and the dead out of the sea. Each chapter tells one person's story, and each one passes the baton to the next.

Brandt Andersen expanded his own short film Refugee into this feature, and the structure is its great strength. By changing perspective, the film refuses easy categories: the smuggler is not only a villain, the soldier is not only a soldier, the rescuer is not only a hero. Yasmine Al Massri is powerful as the doctor, and the cast, with Omar Sy, Ziad Bakri and Constantine Markoulakis, gives every chapter weight.

It is an American production, and at moments you feel the urge to make sure no one misses the message. But the sequences at sea are frightening and beautifully made, and the way the stories finally connect is genuinely moving. The film's title comes from the Bible verse about welcoming the stranger, and that is exactly the question it puts to the audience. Emotional, humane and important.