On Tuesday 6th December, politicians and journalists met at the Frontline Club to talk with Nujeen Mustafa about her book The Girl From Aleppo and to discuss the West’s response to the Syrian Crisis.

The brutal end of the city’s siege has seen the remains of Aleppo broadcast around the globe. When asked how she felt about these images she replied “relief… but it still hurts.”

Nujeen, who has cerebral palsy, traveled as a refugee across Europe in a wheelchair. She was turned away from borders and the stigma of being a refugee fell heavily on her. However, in her characteristically understated way, she refers to her portrayal as a danger to host countries as “annoying”.

The misrepresentation of refugees was at the forefront of the evening’s discussion. Christina Lamb, Sunday Times Foreign Correspondent and co-author of Nujeen’s book, mentioned that a major difficulty in reporting the refugee crisis was stopping stories getting lost in the vast numbers: “thats why I wanted to tell Nujeen’s story…she wanted people to know that refugees are just like us.”

In the Syrian conflict, control of the message is all important.

Lamb said that the Syrian state had “created their own narrative”. Assad, whom Lamb interviewed last month, was confident of winning the conflict, stating that between him and Al-Nusra, Syrians would be prepared to settle for him.

Andrew Mitchell MP believed that the conflict would end in one of two ways. Given that no military victory was possible, the war was “bound to … end in negotiation”. He added that there was a silver lining in Trump’s election in that, together with Putin, they might be able to reach an agreement in their efforts to unite against ISIS.

This was small comfort to much of the panel. Journalist and analyst Mina Al-Oraibi found it hard to believe that a populace pitted against such violence would accept a brokered peace so willingly: “Our greatest hope for a resolution is that Trump can make a deal with Putin? … How do you tell Syrian’s that?”

Indeed, it is Assad’s forces that is the greatest threat to civilians. The Syrian Network For Human Rights placed 93% of civilian deaths in the hands of Assad’s forces. Lamb backed this up: “I never met a single Syrian refugee who said they were leaving because of ISIS.”

The panel agreed that the crisis highlighted problems within organisations like the UN. Echoing words that he later used in parliament, Mitchell said “the international rules based system is in great jeopardy at the moment”. This comes at an important time, when the world needs more multilateral cooperation whilst nationalism is on the rise. These final statements matched Nujeen’s own: Many people “only think about the differences, not what we have in common. Which is everything I suppose.”

Acclaimed British foreign correspondent and author Christina Lamb now tells the timely and inspiring story of a remarkable young hero: sixteen year-old Nujeen Mustafa. Born with cerebral palsy, Nujeen undertook a harrowing journey from war-ravaged Aleppo to Germany in all in a wheelchair. She tells the details of her experience for the first time in a memoir, Nujeen, co-authored with Christina Lamb.

In the context of Nujeen’s unimaginable journey, we will look at the course of the Syrian Civil War, the impact of bringing individual stories to the public, and action Western countries could take to bring urgent relief to the besieged population of Aleppo.

Chaired by Azadeh Moaveni (@AzadehMoaveni), former Middle East correspondent for Time magazine. She reported from throughout the region for much of the past decade, and speaks Persian and Arabic. Her books include Lipstick Jihad, Honeymoon in Tehran, and she is co-author, with Shirin Ebadi, of Iran Awakening.

Speakers (full panel announced soon):

Nujeen Mustafa (@NujeenMustafa) is a Syrian refugee currently based in Germany and author of the memoir Nujeen

Christina Lamb (@christinalamb) is the roving foreign affairs correspondent for The Sunday Times. She has been a foreign correspondent for more than twenty five years, living in Pakistan, Brazil and South Africa first for the Financial Times then The Sunday Times. She is the author of The Africa House, House of Stone: The True Story of a Family Divided in War-torn Zimbabwe, Waiting For Allah: Pakistan’s Struggle for Democracy, The Sewing Circles of Herat, My Afghan Years and co-author of I Am Malala. Her newest book Nujeen: One Girl’s Incredible Journey From War-Torn Syria in a Wheelchair is published by Harper Collins.

Rt Hon. Andrew Mitchell is the MP for Sutton Coldfield and Secretary of State for International Development.

Mina Al-Oraibi (@AlOraibi) is an Iraqi-British journalist and political analyst, a senior fellow at the Institute of State Effectiveness and a Yale World Fellow. She is a member of the Global Agenda Council on the Middle East and has written extensively on US and European policies in the Middle East, in addition to conducting several high profile interviews including with US President Barack Obama and Iraqi Prime Minister Haider Al-Abadi.

On Wednesday the 12th of October, a panel of five experts in the refugee crisis gathered to discuss the tragedy that often ensues when a refugee attempts to leave their home country.

May Bulman, a journalist with The Independent, chaired the event and asked Reece Jones, a Professor at the University of Hawaii, whether the brutality when crossing borders has worsened, and if so – why?

“Yes. I would say definitely it has gotten worse. I argue it’s for two reasons: one is that the changing perception that border guards’ primary duty is to prevent the movement of terrorists and other violent threats… The second factor is the funnelling of people on the move to much more dangerous places to cross… as the easier places to cross are closed down, they have to take a much more dangerous route.” Reece Jones

The International Rescue Committee’s Elinor Raikes described the ripple effect caused by the poorly coordinated border closures: “We’ve seen a significant impact on people right across the route – families separated, fathers and husbands in Germany waiting for their families that were on their way, families now stranded in Turkey.”

Heaven Crawley discussed the varied and troubling backstories of migrants in Greece

“When we talk to people we found that it’s pretty unusual that people left the place where they lived with an idea they would go to Europe, and that’s where they went… The vast majority of people get out, and then work out where to go next.”

Richard Savage, works for charity Save the Children, and works to move refugees directly from their homeland to a new country. “The risks of going across the mediterranean were less than going home.” He highlighted the benefits of the borders to private military companies: “they’re going to make money, aren’t they? By rolling out barbed wire, producing weapon systems for border guards – does it stem from the perception of terrorism?”

In the absence of legitimate methods of travelling to safer lands, smugglers enjoy a booming trade with a huge supply of refugees willing to pay to escape their home country. Elinor Raikes discussed the irony of a system that refuses entry actually increases risk: “you’re pushing people into these illegal, uncontrolled, unmanaged routes, and actually it’s worse for our security.” She described the “pitiful” EU numbers in rehoming refugees, “the UN considers that 10% of displaced people globally should be resettled because they’re considered the most vulnerable, the EU share of that should be 108,000 a year. And the latest draft that’s making the rounds around the council and Parliament at the moment is talking around 20,000 a year.”

Harriet Agerholm sat down with The Guardian‘s migration correspondent and author Patrick Kingsley to discuss his latest book, The New Odyssey: The Story of Europe’s Refugee Crisis.

Filmed and edited by Adam Barr.

Heated discussion on the issue of Europe’s crisis in handling the arrival of refugees took place at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 4 May.

From the disproportionate focus placed on the Mediterranean crossing, to the misconception that migration is negative by default and the idea that lobbying Turkey to allow Syrians to work is the answer, the panel dispelled the myths surrounding the crisis.

Patrick Kingsley, author of The New Odyssey and the Guardian‘s inaugural migration correspondent, began by speaking about his extensive reporting of the crisis. The central stories in his book range from that of a smuggler, to a civil servant, to a pregnant refugee woman. Kingsley writes of how he travelled across the Macedonian border with the pregnant woman, who believes the child she is carrying has died.

Heaven Crawley, a leading researcher of migration, said that Kingsley depicted the movement of people more completely than many correspondents before him. Media coverage often focuses only on the crossing to Greece, and yet, “the European focus on the journey across the Mediterranean is such a small part of it,” said Crawley.

Kingsley’s reporting navigates the different routes to Europe and explores the various driving factors of migration. This is important in a Europe where, Crawley said, “policy is about 15 years behind the dynamics of the movement.”

Hassan Akkad, a teacher and freelance photographer who fled the Assad regime in 2012, illustrated European ignorance on a personal level. When people hear the word refugee they expect to see a Syrian in rags, he said. “I’ve had people questioning me about why I had a cell phone.” And yet, many who have fled the war are middle class with much to contribute; Akkad is fluent in English and has studied Shakespeare.

Akkad went on to detail how he came to be in the UK. His crime, for which he suffered broken bones and solitary confinement, was protesting peacefully against Assad: “Protesting in Syria is like a suicide mission. You say goodbye to your family because you never know where you are going to end up,” he said.

L-R: Patrick Kingsley, Heaven Crawley, Lindsey Hilsum, Hassan Akkad, John Dalhuisen. Photo by Tolly Robinson

On the journey, the Syrians that Akkad travelled with were from all walks of life – and their first encounter with Europe was not a happy one. Greek marine forces launched an attack on their boat: “I felt like Syria was on a dinghy. And we were not welcome,” said Akkad. He told the audience that for now he has put his career as a teacher and photographer on hold in order to tell the story of the Syrian people, jokingly dubbing himself “the professional refugee.”

The chair, Channel 4’s international editor Lindsey Hilsum, turned the discussion towards possible solutions. In order to explain how circumstances had become so grave, John Dalhuisen of Amnesty International said that many European governments were enacting hostile asylum policies and closing their borders to prevent the far right from sweeping to power.

Dalhuisen said that this had intensified the crisis, which is almost unprecedented. “We’re looking at quite a distinct phenomenon,” he asserted.

Kingsley disagreed regarding the relative scale of the problem. “It’s actually quite small numbers,” he said. He argued that Europe, as the world’s wealthiest continent, has more than the capacity and resources to deal with the numbers arriving on its shores.

According to Kingsley, the surge in migration is a result of the poor management of legitimate passage to the UK. People were able to wait a few years in interim countries such as Turkey before being granted visas to Europe, but they could not wait the half-decade that they were forced to. “Resettlement provides a reason for people to stay put,” he said. After so long, with no legal means to achieve more prosperous and safe lives for themselves and their families, “inevitably, people decided to vote with their feet,” Kingsley added.

Crawley agreed: “The problem is at our end, we haven’t adjusted,” she said. She dismissed the arbitrary way in which European governments treat all the countries from which people are migrating as if they are the same. “What we need in policy terms is nuance,” she said. And the whole conversation around the issue needs to shift: “The idea of the end point being to stop people is nonsense,” she said.

An audience member asked about the responsibility of the wealthy neighbouring Gulf states. Akkad responded that despite presenting itself as the “mother of Islam”, Saudi Arabia had offered fleeing Syrians no support. Kingsley added: “We shouldn’t judge our response by the yardstick of the Gulf states… it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be doing more as well.”

One journalist in the audience asked how it is possible to maintain public interest on such an ongoing humanitarian crisis. Following the surge in media attention in 2015, attention has drifted away. In the beginning, he said, Kingsley’s aim was to humanise the crisis. Now that so many journalists have told the personal and tragic tales of individual refugees, a degree of compassion fatigue has taken over. Kingsley said he had to keep taking different approaches. “In terms of keeping people engaged,” he admitted, “it’s a real struggle.”

Photos by Tolly Robinson

Words by Harriet Agerholm

On a panel moderated by David Loyn, Gordon Brown, Julia Gillard and Kevin Watkins discussed funding education for Syrian child refugees.

On Wednesday 18 November, Gulwali Passarlay enlightened a packed audience at the Frontline Club into his journey as an unaccompanied child refugee from Afghanistan to the United Kingdom. Joined by former Afghanistan correspondent for the BBC David Loyn, and Nadene Ghouri who co-authored his book The Lightless Sky, Passarlay was keen to address the complexities of the refugee crisis from both a personal and political perspective.

“My mother sent me away- she saved me but she lost me too”- @GulwaliP who left Afghanistan aged 12, running for his life (@frontlineclub)

— Maeve McClenaghan (@MaeveMCC) November 17, 2015

Loyn began the discussion by offering context on the current refugee crisis. “There are many Gulwalis in the world. Almost 60 million people are displaced, between 10 and 15 million people a year move from their homes and Afghanistan is the second largest country people flee from – 800,000 people are internally displaced.”

Passarlay began his journey when his mother paid smugglers to help him escape from Afghanistan after his father and grandfather were shot by US soldiers. “For a mother to decide to send her 12 and 13 year-old children away is extraordinary. I am sure she did not understand the implications and the dangers that I would face along the way. Neither did I,” said Passarlay. “Throughout my journey, my biggest issue and fear was uncertainty.”

Loyn asked Passarlay: “Why do you think your mother trusted your life with smugglers? And what was in it for the smugglers to keep you alive?”

“Smugglers need to maintain their reputation. The system of smuggling is more effective and efficient than the government! She was faced with a difficult circumstance, and through family friends she found a smuggler that was her only hope in giving her sons a better life,” answered Passarlay.

During the harrowing journey Passarlay was separated from his brother, which he referred to as a significantly traumatic experience. “My mother said to not let go of each other, but in Peshawar we were so quickly separated. For the rest of my journey, I had three things to do: I wanted to look for my brother, I needed to get across and I desperately missed home.”

Even arriving in Italy after a life-threatening boat trip from Greece, Passarlay was determined to get to England and find his sibling. “I am forever grateful to the people of Italy who genuinely wanted to keep me safe and welcomed and wanted to help me. But I had to find my brother.”

Responding to Loyn‘s question on why many refugees and migrants have their sights set on the United Kingdom as their final destination, Passarlay said: “I would have loved to have settled in Italy, but the language barrier was far too difficult. Whenever I talk to people from the right-wing, I tell them it’s a great thing for people to want to come to seek refuge in their country. Why? England embodies ideals of hope and opportunity; English is an international language and holds a historical and cultural connection to many countries thanks to the British Empire. But some also believe that Britain was involved in the conflict that exists in their country, such as Afghanistan, so migrants feel Britain has a moral responsibility to take them in.”

Passarlay concluded that he eventually managed to reach England and survive his journey thanks to fellow refugees, who have become his “brothers.”

“As the youngest, I needed help more than anyone. I tried not to show my innocent side, so I acted tough and put on a brave face – but this was not the case. The thousands of people I met were all literally in the same boat as me. We needed each other’s companionship and partnership.”

Loyn then directed the discussion towards Passarlay‘s difficult journey into Greece by boat, when his vessel almost didn’t make it. “Hearing that 2,000 migrants sunk earlier this year kept me awake at night. I feel their pain. I know exactly what they are going through. We were stuck [in the overcrowded boat] for 49 hours.”

Speaking on her experience of writing The Lightless Sky with Passarlay, Ghouri said: “It was a privilege to work with him. The story of unaccompanied refugee children is one I have always wanted to tell, and Gulwali is amazing for deciding to give a voice to many others who have been in his situation.”

@frontlineclub thank you for giving us the opportunity to have this evening' event for #TheLightlessSky it was great pic.twitter.com/8iJKOtqKSZ

— Gulwali Passarlay (@GulwaliP) November 18, 2015

In response to a question from Loyn on his advice for the Home Office, Passarlay commented: “What we are doing right now is not enough.”

An audience member from the Office of the Children’s Commissioner for England commended Passarlay for his courage in reporting his story, and said that his book should be used by the Home Office as a guide into how to better process unaccompanied child refugees. The audience member said: “I believe that things have gotten worse since you made your journey Gulwali. My organisation has churned numbers and figures to notice that since December 2014 to March 2015, over half of unaccompanied minors have their age disputed… Local authorities need to rise to the challenge.”

Ghouri agreed that the response to the refugee crisis by both the government and the media had been far from acceptable. “The British press do not report the full picture on the migrant crisis, so people in this country do not understand what is happening. There are only 3,000 people in Calais, but the press makes it feel like there are much more.”

More information about The Lightless Sky is available here.

On 3 November at the Frontline Club, photojournalist Greg Constantine spoke to UNHCR’s UK representative Gonzalo Vargas Llosa about Nowhere People, Constantine’s body of ten years of photographic work on the world’s estimated 10m stateless people.

A stateless person “under law is considered no citizen of any country,” said Constantine. “Once citizenship is severed, it opens people up to an array of deprivation of rights.”

The number of global stateless may exceed 10m, according to Vargas Llosa, as “very few governments want to give exact statistics on stateless people inside their borders.”

Constantine’s talk at the Frontline Club comes on the first anniversary of the launch of I Belong, a UN campaign to “end the scourge of statelessness by 2024,” said Vargas Llosa.

Constantine showed images from his meetings with stateless peoples, including the Rohingya in Bangladesh and Malaysia; Nubians in Kenya; Filipinos in Saba, Malaysia; the Dali in Nepal; the Dom in Iraq; ethnic Haitians in the Dominican Republic; and Roma in Italy.

“Roma fell through huge legal gaps where citizenship was not extended to them” after end of Yugoslavia says @grconstantine @frontlineclub

— Charlotte Beale (@CharlotteAGB) November 3, 2015

Constantine also shared quotes from stateless men and women he had met, including from Jafar, a stateless Rohingya in Bangladesh: “Because we don’t have citizenship, we are like a fish out of water, flapping and unable to breathe. When a fish is out of water, he suffocates.”

“The legacy of colonialism is very much a part of people becoming stateless in Asia and Africa,” said Constantine. “The creation of the idea of ‘others’ that came from French colonialism is responsible for the Ivory Coast’s stateless people… Denial of citizenship is directly attached to Ivorian conflict and the 2002 civil war was borne from a clash of identity – us and them.”

He added: “Most times, you find stateless people are not refugees. Most have never left the country in which they were born.”

“The Rohingya is by far the most extreme example of statelessness in the world today,” Constantine continued, despite them playing a huge role in the economy of southern Bangladesh.

“40,000 Rohingya are living segregated lives in Internationally Displaced Persons (IDP) camps [in Burma],” said Constantine. They are put up in “tents… that psychologically make them think their situation as IDPs is temporary… The conflict has been manufactured by Burmese central government, by 40 years of oppressive policies that pitted communities against each other.”

“The administrative tactics states use to humiliate their stateless fly under the radar of the world’s media,” said Constantine. Discrimination against ethnic Haitians in the Dominican Republic has been “manifested into policy.”

Vargas Llosa added that in the Dominican Republic, “statelessness is the result of deliberate, well-planned, well-executed policies” by the government.

While “huge strides” have been made in Iraq, which has “some of the most progressive laws in the Middle East,” Domari gypsies still suffer. Similarly, after the break-up of Yugoslavia, “Roma fell through huge legal gaps where citizenship was not extended to them.” Because of certain laws, generations of Roma in Italy “are not afforded opportunities to become citizens,” Constantine said.

“Gender discriminating nationality laws are all over the Middle East and Africa,” added Constantine. He highlighted this with a comment on the situation in Lebanon – a young subject born to a Lebanese mother and a stateless father must inherit her father’s stateless condition. 27 countries globally limit a mother’s ability to pass her nationality onto her family.

A member of the audience pointed out that “the state is often an enemy of the people it is supposed to be administering,” and asked Constantine and Vargas Llosa their opinion of the role of the state in creating statelessness crises.

“What strikes one from Greg’s images is the evil a state can do,” Vargas Llosa agreed. “What happens when the caregiver of human rights ends up being the vehicle which perpetrates the denial of those rights?”

Constantine deplored the “sovereign right of a state to determine who its citizens are and who they aren’t.”

Visit the Nowhere People website to find out more.

Although their hardship is seemingly invisible, the problem of statelessness remains a factor in the growth of organised crime, armed conflict and the ongoing refugee crisis. Whilst some governments are waking up to these issues, little is being done to give a voice to the millions that are lost in the cracks of today’s state system.

Photojournalist Greg Constantine has spent the past decade documenting the lives of the stateless around the world. He will be joining us to present Nowhere People, a body of work that reveals the human face of statelessness whilst providing tangible evidence of a problem that is all too easy to ignore.

Chaired by Gonzalo Vargas Llosa, UNHCR’s Representative to the UK. He arrived in London after four years as the Refugee Agency’s Representative in the Dominican Republic. He has also served in New York, Panama and UNHCR’s Geneva headquarters, as well as on emergency missions in Pakistan, Darfur, Sudan and Libya.

Greg Constantine is an American photojournalist currently based in Southeast Asia. Since the beginning of his career he has worked on longterm projects such as Moments From Modern Day Edo (about Tokyo), A Matter of Exposure (about North Korean Refugees) and The Road to Re-Entry (about formerly incarcerated women in Watts, Los Angeles).

PLEASE NOTE THIS EVENT WILL BE FILMED AND STREAMED LIVE ON OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL

L-R: Sean McAllister, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown and Amer Daoud

The plight of Syrians has returned to the headlines following the recent release of a tragic image of young Aylan Kurdi lying dead in the sand. It is easy to forget that the current situation in Syria, and the millions of refugees who have been forced to flee the country, has its roots in the Syrian Revolution of 2011 and the brutal response of the Assad regime.

In his latest film, A Syrian Love Story, Sean McAllister follows the story of one family torn apart by the political imprisonment of a mother, as they experience the civil war and finally find refuge in Paris.

On Wednesday 23 September, McAllister, alongside the film’s protagonist Amer Daoud and journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, joined an audience at the Frontline Club for a Q&A following the screening.

Throughout the film, McAllister‘s close relationship to Daoud, his wife Raghda and their children is evident. “[McAllister became] part of the story in a way, which is quite a dangerous thing for a journalist,” said Alibhai-Brown. “We’re all trained: you must be distant, you just be objective, you must be balanced. All rubbish really.”

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

McAllister, who has shot many films in the Middle East, told the Frontline Club that he felt guilty for only visiting countries when they were at war. “I’ve made films in Iraq under Saddam Hussein and after… I always remember them talking about the golden days, before war,” he said. When he heard someone say that Damascus in Syria was like Iraq in the golden days he thought he’d go and see for himself.

Before the Arab Spring uprising and the subsequent civil war, McAllister travelled to Syria to find a story. “I kind of fell in love with this place… there was fun with fear in those days and I was hanging out there for maybe, on and off in this insane way that we do making documentaries, about eight months,” he said.

In the film, McAllister says he met Daoud in a bar in Damascus, a serendipitous encounter that Alibhai-Brown seemed initially reluctant to believe.

“Yeah, I saw this man, he asked everybody in the street: ‘What do you think about freedom? Is Syria free? And what do you think about this president Bashar al-Assad, why is his picture everywhere?’” Daoud said of McAllister. “He’s crazy to ask these questions.”

Daoud told the Frontline Club audience that he was worried at first when McAllister began to ask him these dangerous questions. “That’s why it took five years to make [the film],” said McAllister. “It took me two years to get [Daoud’s] trust and then his wife came out of prison and she didn’t trust me for another two years.”

Although the film focuses very centrally on Daoud and Raghda’s relationship, McAllister said that this was not the focus from the outset. In fact, McAllister’s initial failure to secure a commission for the film had a significant impact on its direction.

“It wasn’t that I was planning it, it wasn’t a master plan, I just couldn’t get it commissioned,” he said. “If it had been commissioned earlier it would have been an Arab Spring film that would have been largely around the topical events of the time.”

When Daoud and his family left Syria, McAllister said he was initially worried that the film would lose momentum. “But actually,” he said, “what started to happen between them for me as a filmmaker was much more interesting in France. And it was this fragmentation… this disillusionment and disconnection to this whole place.”

McAllister also said that once Daoud had moved to France, he became a lot more involved in their relationship. “My role became even more connected. They would call one week, [Daoud] would call me up and say: ‘You’ve got to come now, tomorrow, we don’t know what the fuck’s going on. You’re the only person that’s been with us on all of this, you can make sense. And the next week [Raghda] would be calling me up saying, ‘Sean, come now’.

“Because although these people that have gone through so much talk to so many interesting people that want to help, they’re looking in the eyes of people that really don’t know what they’ve been through. And I think that’s the disassociation, the disconnection we have with this tragedy in Europe now.”

Amer Daoud

Daoud explained why many refugees were so desperate to come to Europe. His experience of being a refugee in Lebanon, he told the Frontline Club, was one of purgatory. “You cannot imagine how you live without papers, without food, without anybody to take care of you. What are you? Nothing. You are waiting for just one thing: death. All the refugees are the same. They have a hope to come to Europe,” he said.

L-R: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, Sean McAllister and Amer Daoud

A Syrian Love Story has started to gain more traction than McAllister is used to. He admitted that despite his best efforts, most of his work finds a niche audience. “My target audience is three mates back in Hull that don’t give a monkeys about wherever I go… and try to get them into that space” he said. “Usually that doesn’t matter and it still goes out to 265 people on BBC Four.” However, on this occasion current events have pushed the film out to more people.

“You deliver a good film and there’s unfortunately a dead body of a boy swept up on a beach,” said McAllister referring to the photo of Alyan Kurdi published earlier this month. Due to the urgency these photos have given to the refugee story, A Syrian Love Story will be broadcast in a prime BBC One slot.

“It’s not easy for eight million Syrian refugees, it’s not easy. But I think we can find a way to press our governments somehow, in Europe, to organise travel between Europe and the places of refugees,” said Daoud.

However, as McAllister said, it is much harder to support refugees in their emotional upheaval. “We went to some of the camps in Bulgaria and places on the border and it was just horrendous. I mean it was so bad that the refugees there, having been beaten up by the Bulgarian police, were trying to get back to Syria,” said McAllister.

He did not blame Bulgaria, but said there needed to be a more concerted effort.

“What we don’t really realise is how many people live like [Daoud],” said McAllister. “I think he moved houses about 16 times in the making of this film and there were times I knew he didn’t have anything, that they’d not eaten for days. And that’s not unusual for a lot of people in his situation.”

A member of the Frontline audience asked Daoud how, after leaving everything behind in Syria, he supports himself and his family. “How do I support myself?” he said, “I train my face to smile everyday.”

Sean McAllister (left) and Amer Daoud

Visit the A Syrian Love Story website for more information on the film and upcoming screenings.