Based on 14 million true stories, I WAS A STRANGER follows a Syrian doctor and her daughter as they flee Aleppo in search of safety. Their journey sets off a chain of events connecting five strangers — a smuggler, a soldier, a poet and a coast guard captain — whose choices collide in a crisis that tests courage, conscience and humanity.

Rialto Recommends I WAS A STRANGER is urgent, humane and deeply moving: a story of displacement told through the lives it unexpectedly connects. By following strangers caught on different sides of the same crisis, it asks what we owe one another when survival is at stake. Powerful, timely and compassionate, this is cinema with a human pulse.