Producers Steven Spielberg and J.J. Abrams have enlisted Lena Dunham (Girls) to pen an adaptation of Melissa Fleming’s non-fiction book A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea, which is being developed as a feature by Paramount Pictures and Amblin Partners.
The book tells the true story of Doaa Al Zamel, a Syrian refugee who fled Egypt with her two children and was shipwrecked en route to Sweden, surviving for days in open water with only an inflatable water ring to support her and her children. Here’s the official book description from Amazon:
This is the story of Doaa, an ordinary girl from a village in Syria, who in 2015 became one of five hundred people crammed on to a fishing boat setting sail for Europe. The boat was deliberately capsized, and of those five hundred people, eleven survived; they were rescued four days after the boat sank. Doaa was one of them – her fiancee Bassem, with whom she had fled, was not; he drowned in front of her. Melissa Fleming, the Chief Spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, heard about Doaa and the death of 489 of her fellow refugees on the day she was pulled out of the water. She decided to fly to Crete to meet this extraordinary girl, who had rescued a toddler when she was nearly dead herself. They struck an instant bond, and Melissa saw in Doaa the story of the war in Syria embodied by one young woman. She has decided to tell Doaa’s story – the dangers she fled, and the journey she risked to escape the conflagration in her homeland. Doaa is the face of the millions of mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, daughters and sons who risk everything as they try to escape war, violence and death. Doaa’s story will revolutionize how we see the thousands of people who die every year in search of a home. It will squarely face one of the greatest moral questions of our age: will we let more people die in boats and trucks, or will we find a way to help them?
Dunham recently penned the HBO comedy Camping, and will next be seen on screen in Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which is set for release in July 2019.
Originally published November 2, 2018. Updated November 1, 2018.
