Arash, a young Hazara asylum seeker and aspiring swimmer, asks artist and nonfiction filmmaker Sara Jordenö to tell his story. She says yes. Seven years later, somewhere in Europe, he disappears.

In The Swimmer, the filmmaker enters the frame and works with actor Ahmad Maher to create a useful fiction.

Translating years of recordings into embodied performance, the actor becomes the filmmaker’s conversation partner in an “as if” space, where memory, testimony, and negotiation remain active after the film’s central subject is no longer there. The interrupted exchange is allowed to continue.

But the fiction begins to speak back. It is no longer obedient. It begins to challenge the filmmaker.

Through a surreal cinema of dislocation, The Swimmer moves along the edge of nonfiction, asking what can be reconstructed, embodied, and addressed in a person’s absence, and what Europe has yet to reckon with ten years after the 2015-16 European refugee crisis.