 | |
| Author | Melissa Fleming |
|---|---|
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Fleet |
Publication date | 2017 |
A Hope More Powerful than the Sea is a book by Melissa Fleming about Syrian refugee Doaa Al Zamel's experiences leading up to and during the 2014 Malta migrant shipwreck.
| | |
| Author | Melissa Fleming |
|---|---|
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Fleet |
Publication date | 2017 |
A Hope More Powerful than the Sea is a book by Melissa Fleming about Syrian refugee Doaa Al Zamel's experiences leading up to and during the 2014 Malta migrant shipwreck.
A Hope More Powerful than the Sea was published by Fleet in 2017. [1] It was written by Melissa Fleming, the chief spokesperson for United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. [2]
The book starts with Doaa Al Zamel's early life, growing up in Daraa, Syria. [3] Al Zamel has a happy childhood, living in the extended family home, until the Syrian civil war breaks out. [4] Her family flee to Egypt where she gets engaged to Bassam. [1] In Egypt, Bassam and Al Zamel pay people smugglers to move them to Europe, boarding a boat with 500 other refugees. [1] [5] The boat capsizes in the Mediterranean Sea, with all but eleven of the passengers drowning. Bassam does not make it, Al Zamel is one of the eleven. [1]
Jenny Sawyer writing in The Christian Science Monitor credit's Fleming's ability to tell the personal story and frame it in the wider refugee crisis, but also notes the lack of Al Zamel's own voice, the story only ever being told by the third party narrator. [4]
Hannah Solel writing in the Financial Times called the book gripping and moving. [1]
Steven Spielberg bought the rights to the book, but production stopped after the producers received media backlash in 2018 for commissioning white American writer and actor Lena Dunham for penning the script, who has previously been accused of being a hipster racist. [6] Flemming, along with other Syrian rights activists, accused Spielberg and co-producer JJ Abrams of whitewashing for hiring Dunham to write the screenplay. [7] [8]
The Syrian civil war is an ongoing multi-sided conflict in Syria involving various state-sponsored and non-state actors. In March 2011, popular discontent with the rule of Bashar al-Assad triggered large-scale protests and pro-democracy rallies across Syria, as part of the wider Arab Spring protests in the region. After months of crackdown by governments security apparatus, various armed rebel groups such as the Free Syrian Army began forming across the country, marking the beginning of the Syrian insurgency. By mid-2012, the crisis had escalated into a full-blown civil war.
Lena Dunham is an American writer, director, actress, and producer. She is the creator, writer, and star of the HBO television series Girls (2012–2017), for which she received several Emmy Award nominations and two Golden Globe Awards. Dunham also directed several episodes of Girls and became the first woman to win the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Comedy Series. Prior to Girls, Dunham wrote, directed, and starred in the semi-autobiographical independent film Tiny Furniture (2010), for which she won an Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay. Her second feature film, Sharp Stick, written and directed by Dunham, was released in 2022. Her third film, Catherine Called Birdy, had its world premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 12, 2022. It was released in a limited release on September 23, 2022, by Amazon Studios, prior to streaming on Prime Video on October 7, 2022.
Refugees of the Syrian Civil War are citizens and permanent residents of Syria who have fled the country throughout the Syrian Civil War. The pre-war population of the Syrian Arab Republic was estimated at 22 million (2017), including permanent residents. Of that number, the United Nations (UN) identified 13.5 million (2016) as displaced persons, requiring humanitarian assistance. Of these, since the start of the Syrian Civil War in 2011 more than six million (2016) were internally displaced, and around five million (2016) had crossed into other countries, seeking asylum or placed in Syrian refugee camps worldwide. It is often described as one of the largest refugee crises in history.
In September 2014, it was announced by the International Organization for Migration that a ship sank off the Malta coast on September 11, 2014, killing around 500 migrants. There were eleven survivors. The ship left Damietta, Egypt, on September 6 and sank five days later on September 11. Two Palestinian survivors of the wreck accuse the traffickers of intentionally sinking the vessel after the refugees would not agree to transfer to a different ship.
During 2015, there was a period of significantly increased movement of refugees and migrants into Europe. 1.3 million people came to the continent to request asylum, the most in a single year since World War II. They were mostly Syrians, but also included significant numbers from Afghanistan, Nigeria, Pakistan, Iraq, Eritrea, and the Balkans. The increase in asylum seekers has been attributed to factors such as the escalation of various wars in the Middle East and ISIL's territorial and military dominance in the region, as well as Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt ceasing to accept Syrian asylum seekers.
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This is a timeline of the European migrant crisis of 2015 and 2016.
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Zinzi Clemmons is an American writer. She is known for her 2017 debut novel What We Lose.
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The following is a list of unproduced J. J. Abrams projects in roughly chronological order. During a career that has spanned over 30 years, J. J. Abrams has worked on projects which never progressed beyond the pre-production stage under his direction.
Refugees of the Syrian Civil War in Turkey are the Syrian refugees fleeing the Syrian Civil War. The Republic of Turkey hosts over 3.7 million registered refugees.
Turkey's migrant crisis, sometimes referred to as Turkey's refugee crisis, was a period during the 2010s characterised by a high number of people migrating to Turkey. Turkey received the highest number of registered refugees of any country or territory each year from 2014 to 2019, and had the world's largest refugee population according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). The majority were refugees of the Syrian Civil War, numbering 3.6 million as of June 2020. In 2018, the UNHCR reported that Turkey hosted 63.4% of all "registered Syrian refugees."
The second government of Hussein Arnous was formed after appointment by the President of Syria on 10 August 2021 and took the oath of office on 14 August 2021, after the presidential election held in May. This replaced the caretaker ministry formed in July. The government is the 95th since Syria gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and is the eighth during the presidency of Bashar al-Assad.
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Melissa Ruth Fleming is an American journalist, author, and United Nations official. She has been head of the United Nations Department of Global Communications since 2019.
Doaa Al Zamel is a Syrian refugee and one of 11 survivors of the 2014 Malta migrant shipwreck that killed approximately 500 people.
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