Waad Al-Kateab's We Dare To Dream: The story of displacement and determination

Waad Al-Kateab made her name in the cinematic landscape because of her deeply personal portrait of life, love and trauma during the Syrian Civil War.

For Sama documents five years of her survival during the uprising in Aleppo and, with the help of director Edward Watts, she turned her footage into an Oscar-nominated and BAFTA award-winning documentary.

"They have become stateless after escaping their respective countries and are now building their lives back up, and their training, in order to continue their dream of Olympic glory"

Now Al-Kateab has set her camera lens on similarly displaced individuals, though these subjects are striving to compete at the highest levels of athletic competition, with Angelina Jolie as executive producer.

We Dare To Dream, which played at this year’s Tribeca Film Festival, narrows in on four particular athletes who joined the refugee team to participate in the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

They have become stateless after escaping their respective countries and are now building their lives back up, and their training, in order to continue their dream of Olympic glory; 1500m runner Anjelina Nadai Lohalith was forced to flee violence and war in South Sudan as a child. She settled at a Kenyan refugee camp in 2002 where she was scouted by the Tegla Loroupe Foundation to become an athlete.

Weightlifter Cyrille Tchatchet II came to the UK from Cameroon in 2014 and after his asylum claim was approved, he became a mental health nurse and a British weightlifting champion.

Then we have Olympic bronze medalist and Taekwondo star, Kimia Alizadeh and canoeist Saeid Fazloula, who both fled Iran and settled in Germany to continue their competitive journeys.

"In one poignant scene, Tchatchet describes the moment he contemplated suicide after sleeping rough for weeks in the UK. He had just competed in the Commonwealth Games, representing Cameroon, but didn’t want to go back"

At its best, this is a film that tries to humanise these individuals beyond the refugee label. Al-Kateab traces the competitive process from training, team selection, qualification and competition, peppering in interviews with the athletes about their Olympic hopes, dreams and the harrowing circumstances that brought them to this point.

In one poignant scene, Tchatchet describes the moment he contemplated suicide after sleeping rough for weeks in the UK. He had just competed in the Commonwealth Games, representing Cameroon, but didn’t want to go back.

Feeling hopeless he found a cliff in Brighton but saw a Samaritans sign nearby. He called them, and the police came and talked him off the ledge but then he was arrested and detained for breaching immigration laws.

Later we see Alizadeh face her home country of Iran in an Olympic heat with her former teammate. Thanks to the televised nature of the Olympics, the film benefits from substantial footage of the refugee team’s performances but it is in a talking head interview, after Alizadeh beats the Iranian competitor, that the full weight of the athletic confrontation is felt.

Al-Kateab asks the athlete what she whispered in her opponent’s ear as they ended the match. “Don’t play their game,” Alizadeh says. “Don’t let them exploit you.”

Both Alizadeh and Fazloula discuss the backlash from the Iranian regime who have publicly denounced and denigrated their achievements but the documentary doesn’t quite deliver on the political context for each athlete’s displacement.

"While the film acknowledges that these athletes are dealing with more than the average Olympian, it doesn’t probe deep enough to present that internal conflict on a global competitive stage"

Neither does it really get under the psychological surface of what goes into competing at the highest level.

Sports psychology is a massive part of what makes or breaks an athlete; the mind needs to be trained as much as the body.

While the film, of course, acknowledges that these athletes are dealing with more than the average Olympian, Al-Kateab doesn’t probe deep enough to present that internal conflict on a global competitive stage.

Where For Sama felt like an exposed nerve of heartache, fear and perseverance of a woman in the face of astonishing threat, We Dare To Dream lacks that interiority.

Getting under the skin of these people beyond their refugee status and Olympic dreams isn’t quite achieved in favour of a more broad-stroke approach that seems more fitting to a news programme than a cinema screen. That, and putting Al-Kateab in as a framing device pulls focus away from the story at hand.

Airbnb co-founder and billionaire Joe Gebbia funded the film and told Variety he played an active role in the film’s pre-production, production, and editing. This may explain the corporate, mostly surface-level feel to the final product.

We Dare To Dream is a documentary with a worthy focus but its dry, cinematic delivery isn’t as daring as it could have been.

Hanna Flint is a film and TV critic, writer and author of Strong Female Character with bylines at Empire, Time Out, Elle, Town & Country, the Guardian, BBC Culture and IGN.

Follow her here: @HannaFlint