'Sweden was like a paradise at first – but then reality hits'

In 2013 Jamil Walli, a journalist, filmmaker and painter, moved to Sweden from Damascus as an exchange student.

Two years later, tens of thousands of his compatriots fled Syria to seek shelter in the country he has since come to call home.

As a journalist, he documented the stories of those fleeing persecution as part of a project for The Local where he interviewed asylum seekers in Arabic about their new lives in Sweden and how they were adapting.

This makes him very well placed to talk about his experience of what became known as the refugee crisis of 2015 when an unprecedented 163,000 asylum seekers made their way to Sweden.

After gaining citizenship in 2019 he went on to pursue studies in filmmaking, graduating in 2022 with a film that tackles xenophobia and what it means to be Swedish.

In this week's episode of Sweden in Focus Extra, Walli explains what brought him to Sweden, his own relationship to the country, and how attitudes to immigration and immigrants have changed in the past decade.

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