Film Review: I Was a Stranger (2025) | Greek Film Festival at Palace Cinemas

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Date Reviewed: 18/10/2026

Reviewed by Anushka Dharmadhikari  

I Was a Stranger, directed by Brandt Andersen and based on what the filmmakers describe as 14 million true stories, is one of them. From its opening moments, the film establishes an atmosphere of urgency and weight that signals immediately to its audience: this is not comfortable cinema. It is necessary cinema.

A Syrian doctor, Amira Homsi, played with fierce, bone-deep conviction by Yasmine Al Massri, is forced to flee Aleppo with her young daughter. That single act of desperation sets in motion a chain of events that draws four other strangers into the same converging storm on a single night in the Mediterranean. A smuggler trying to save his son, a soldier wrestling with his conscience, a poet searching for home, and a Greek coast guard captain caught between duty and mercy. 

The five storylines, anchored by Al Massri, Yahya Mahayni as the conflicted soldier Mustafa, Omar Sy as the smuggler Marwan, Ziad Bakri as the poet Fathi, and Constantine Markoulakis as the coast guard captain Stavros, are woven together with a seamlessness that feels almost invisible in the best possible way. You are never lost, never confused about whose story you are in, and yet the moment their threads begin to pull toward each other, the tension becomes almost unbearable. The editing is precise and the storytelling architecture is genuinely impressive for a feature directorial debut.

Not a moment is wasted. That is not a phrase often used honestly in film criticism, but here it holds. Each character is drawn with enough specificity and humanity that you find yourself rooting for all of them simultaneously, even when their interests are in direct conflict. That is a difficult thing to achieve in any film, and I Was a Stranger achieves it with what feels like relative ease.

The performances across the ensemble are uniformly strong. Al Massri is extraordinary, conveying terror, love, and determination with an economy that never tips into melodrama. Sy brings his considerable screen presence to Marwan without overwhelming the ensemble balance, and Markoulakis as Stavros carries the film’s most internal and morally complex arc with quiet, aching restraint. Angeliki Papoulia in a supporting role as Helena adds further texture to the Greek dimension of the story.

The film is heartbreaking. There is no other word for it. And yet it is also, somehow, quietly inspiring, a testament to human endurance and the stubborn persistence of compassion in conditions designed to extinguish it. You will leave the cinema thinking about it. You will likely still be thinking about it days later. And you will feel, with a clarity that only the best films can produce, a profound gratitude for the ground beneath your own feet.

I had the privilege of reviewing I Was a Stranger as part of the Greek Film Festival in Melbourne, screening at Palace Cinemas Como. If this film is representative of what the festival has on offer, it is one of the most essential cultural events on the Melbourne calendar right now. A film of this humanity and craft deserves the largest possible audience, and the Greek Film Festival is giving it exactly that.