Sepideh Moafi
Image Credit: The Star Tracker
What makes a human life worth saving?
Sepideh Moafi confronted that question while sharing her family’s refugee story during a keynote address at the Social Impact Summit in Los Angeles on July 22.
Moafi, who plays Dr. Baran Al-Hashimi on The Pitt, began with a related question: “What makes someone move toward another person’s suffering instead of away from it?”
A family on the run
At the start of her speech, Moafi asked the audience to close their eyes and imagine a young family fleeing their country in the dead of winter. A husband, his pregnant wife and their young daughter who have left everything behind except for the clothes on their bodies and each other.
“It’s a dark night. They make their way to a refugee camp, but they’re not officially registered, and the doors are closed to them. The child is crying. The mother is trying to keep her child warm while the father desperately searches for a way inside”
But in this darkness, she asked the audience to imagine the spark of hope.
“Just when it seems like hope is lost, a voice calls out from a window above. He’s shouting in another language, but the message is clear: We see you. We can help you,” she said, her voice tinged with emotion.
“So these people, who have never met this family and have nothing to gain, use their bodies to make a way up. One by one, they latch themselves onto one another to form a human ladder for the family to climb until they’re safely inside.”
“Why did those people help that family?” Moafi asked.
“I believe it’s because it’s who we are. Human beings instinctively protect one another before politics teaches us otherwise.”
The strangers, she added, “didn’t debate whether that family deserved help. They simply bore witness and acted.”
The Emmy nominee revealed that this story was more than a hypothetical.
“That family standing outside the refugee camp on that freezing winter night was my family.”
The future the ladder made possible.
Moafi’s family fled the Iranian revolution in the early 1980s, leaving everything they had behind and becoming refugees, moving first to Turkey and then Germany, where they sought political asylum.
“I was born in that refugee camp—the very one they found shelter in because of the kindness of fellow refugees from Nigeria, Afghanistan and so many other countries around the world. I believe that’s who we are.”
Years later, during the Syrian war, Moafi found herself wondering why she had been allowed to pursue her dreams while people displaced under similar circumstances were being denied homes and basic rights.
“Right now, how many future doctors are living in Zaatari refugee camp? How many future filmmakers are living in tents surrounded by falling bombs and rubble? How many scientists, teachers, writers, storytellers or future Emmy nominees are waiting for someone to believe that their life is worth saving?”
Their lives already mattered
Today, Moafi is the first Iranian and Middle Eastern woman to be Emmy-nominated for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Drama Series, but the people who helped her didn’t do so because they knew she would be successful; they did it because they saw her and her family as people, not labels.
“We survived because people I will never know and never have the chance to thank believed our lives were worth saving. They didn’t know my sister would become a physician. They didn’t know that I would be standing here. They simply believed that our lives mattered and that we deserved a future.”
Moafi closed her remarks with, “This is the power of philanthropy. It’s an act of faith in someone you’ll probably never meet. It’s the voice calling out from a window on a freezing night. It’s an invisible human ladder. And I know who you really are.”
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