This is the result of what happens when a love of mountains collides with a war correspondent who has a charity, is willing to toss her career for a passion project, and decides to shoot a documentary in six countries in eight weeks.

In 2020 INARA, Arwa’s charity that she founded five years earlier, was organizing an expedition to Mt. Kilimanjaro that was then postponed due to COVID. By the time that INARA was reorganizing for 2022, among other tragedies and fighting around the world, the Taliban had retaken Afghanistan and the war in Ukraine had broken out.

As Arwa looked at how INARA’s expedition would be combining climbers from Syria, Ukraine, and Afghanistan, she realized it was a unique opportunity to tell the story of war and refugees against an adventure backdrop. In addition, it was a chance to tell that story through the eyes of young adults.

Arwa had long struggled with a desperate need to show the full range of complexities of the emotions of the people, especially young adults and children, that she regularly met in warzones and the refugee context. She was especially bothered by the discrepancy in the global reaction to the war in Ukraine versus other non-European wars, knowing and having witnessed how the impact of war is the same no matter where it breaks out.

“I felt in my gut that doing this documentary could have the potential to do more than all of my collective reporting. It was terrifying to leave CNN, but I’m more afraid of living with a “what if” than I am of trying something and failing. So, I decided to go all in.”

Arwa, at the time a senior international correspondent with CNN, decided it was time to part ways with the network that had been her home for 17 years. She has pledged that any proceeds made from this film will be going to charity, including but not limited to the work that INARA does.