For Syrian Refugees, He Is a Friendly Face in a Strange New Land | Short Film Showcase

I think that facing death changes people, which is what happened with me. Before this experience, I was a completely different person with a completely different dream. My last dream, which was to treat cancer, and right now my dream of changing the world in another way.

Staying at the motel is this hard transitional stage. You are homesick and you are also thinking about remaining family members overseas, living under horrendous circumstances. I try my best to introduce the new reality; I try my best to ease the impact of their resettlement process as refugees, as someone who didn't choose to come here, as someone who had to come here.

Hi, my name is Muhammad from the Immigrant Services Society of British Columbia (ISSofBC), contacting you regarding your place on Craigslist. You're looking at the two-bedroom or the three-bedroom? The two-bedroom, the two-bedroom. Yeah, how many people? You have a family of five people with three small kids? Yeah, that's too many, that is too many. Too many. I am with my client right now, so I'm helping him. He wants to share with you that the kids are so small and the ages are... I see, okay. Um, what about the three-bedroom that you have? $3,500 a month going to be expensive for a new immigrant family. Is it possible for you to see the kids, and I can accommodate five people in that way? Yeah, thank you so much.

I'm sorry, moving to Canada is not easy at all. My job is all about providing first-language services to the newly arrived refugees. I am the person who welcomes them, and I will help them with everything that they will need in their resettlement process. It's really hard to explain the reality on the ground in Syria; it keeps on changing on a daily basis. Syrians are just caught up in the middle of this nonsense chaos. Many of them have spent many years in refugee camps in neighboring countries trying to just wait for this crazy war to finish. When they realized it's going to be much longer, this Syrian refugee crisis started before 2011, before everything has started.

We were living a happy life. I was born in Alas, Syria, a very peaceful city, a city of so many languages, ethnic components, religious components, with the idea and the notion of acceptance of others. I was in my fourth year of my medical studies in Syria. I was trying my best to become a doctor, and my dream was to treat cancer. My generation was dreaming of having freedom, having some basic things that the average Canadian would not think about. We never thought we could have faced such a brutal response from our own government just for gathering in the street and shouting the word freedom.

We were just standing there, and surprisingly they started shooting, and people started falling. At that point, everyone started running. Everyone who survived it started running, and some people were just on the ground, covered with blood.

I'm calling you regarding clients of mine who are moving to your place tomorrow morning. Yeah, because we are in the middle of arranging all the transportation needed for all of these families. All righty, thank you so much.

For Syrians, it is so normal to open your Facebook and see the death of your friend. On social media, it is something that is really hard, and that is really difficult to accept, to absorb, and to even think about. I am about to turn 27 next month. In this small lifetime, I have been arrested three times. I have been in five different detention places. The first thing that they did in the detention center was hanging me from the ceiling. They had handcuffs on my hands like this, and they had a chain coming down from the ceiling, and they have hooked the chain to my hands like this, and they kept me like this for three days.

After spending three days like this, the actual torture started. They spent so many days practicing all kinds of torture on me and on other Syrian people in that detention center. I can never forget this old man who was sleeping next to me. He used to say, "You see all of this? One day, all of this will be just a story that you will be telling to other people." After 120 days of torture, I was finally released. I was finally able to see sunlight again. The only thing that I wanted to do is talk to my family. I just wanted to see them, but also say goodbye to them, get the hell out of there, and never look back.

I took a taxi from Damascus to Beirut, where there was no shelling, no explosions, just a normal life three hours away from where I was, from where I was tortured. It was unbelievable for me.

ISSofBC Kinsway, good morning. Syrians in Lebanon are not allowed to work, are not allowed to go to school. Syrians in Lebanon are simply not welcomed. The best job that I could find was washing cars from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. for $20 a day. I was just struggling to have a life.

My whole life changed with a single phone call. I picked up the phone; it was this same phone. So I pick up, and I was told that, "This is the Canadian embassy calling for Muhammad Alale." I was like, "Yes, speaking." So they told me, "We have an application on your behalf to come to Canada. Are you interested?" And I was like, "Yes, I am."

Each Syrian family is thinking about someone who's left behind, if it was a brother, if it was a mother, or if it was a father. This is something that I can see among the people that I'm helping, and this is something that I can relate to on a personal level because of the situation of my family. My family had to illegally cross the border between Syria and Turkey. They had to crawl in the mud in order to make it to safety.

When I last saw my family, my youngest sister was seven. Right now she's ten, and I don't know how old she will be when I meet her. It's really hard to know that you might not be able to meet them.

In order for people to get settled and to feel like home, I think the only missing part is time. They just need time. My first client was a family of 13 people who have just came to Canada. I was telling them, "You are safe now. One year ago, I was standing exactly where you are, and right now I am helping you. So don't worry, everything is going to be fine."

I want everyone to realize how tremendous, how beautiful it is to offer people a place to call home, which is something priceless that I really, really appreciate having right now. It's heartbreaking to see the country that you grew up in get destroyed. I am one of the ones lucky enough to come back from the dead to tell their stories, to share their suffering with the rest of the world, which is something that I think is part of my obligation toward Syrians and toward Canadians.