Sky & Ground (Talya Tibbon, Joshua Bennett, 2018): USA, Austria, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Republic of Macedonia, Serbia and Montenegro

Reviewed by Markus Rusti. Viewed at the Santa Barbara Film Festival 2018.

Sky and ground is a documentary following Guevara and his family and their escape from Aleppo.  Their home is bombarded all the time, and Guevara has decided that it is not safe to stay and they have to escape.

Sky & Ground immerses us into the most significant humanitarian crisis of our time. We follow a large, extended Syrian-Kurdish family, called the Nabi clan as they tediously make their way from Aleppo all the way to Berlin. The family has to walk a long road, hide from police and hopefully be granted asylum in Germany.

The movie shows how hard it is to be a refugee. The families have to connect with illegal smugglers to drive them across borders, but smugglers cost a lot and can often earn more than the refugees could pay by just turning them over to the police.

Guevera wants his family to be happy, and one of the most significant conflicts for him is the toll it takes on his family to walk the distances that they do. It is unquestionably hard for Guevara to hold the spirit up, but he keeps singing and asks everyone how they’re doing all the time.

Sky & Ground is a great film and an important film to be made. What makes this movie so real are the characters we meet. Towards the end of the movie, something happens, and the family has to leave Guevara behind. While Guevara is on his own, you can see that he acts differently around people who are not his family. He is trying to keep his head up while surrounded by people he doesn’t know in a country he has never been in.