Film star and UN goodwill ambassador Angelina Jolie has recorded a video documenting the harrowing stories of three migrants who landed in Malta.

“Hidden behind Malta’s beauty are harrowing stories of survival,” Jolie says at the opening of the five-minute video, which fades from the Grand Harbour to the Swieqi living room of a Syrian doctor.

He lost his wife and daughter in the treacherous Mediterranean crossing. Fighting back tears, he tells Jolie how he still stares at his wife’s Skype account, but the icon remains offline.

The video, entitled Malta: Refugees dying at Europe’s doorstep and uploaded on the official UNHCR You Tube channel, also features two other Syrians whose boat capsized in the migrants’ shipwreck in October 2013, killing hundreds. Jolie, who was recently in Malta with her husband, Brad Pitt, shooting the film By the Sea, often doubles up in her role as a humanitarian activist, focusing on major crises resulting in mass population displacements.

In the clip, the migrants recount how, with no life jackets to help them, fellow travellers held on to corpses to stay afloat.

“I spoke to people of their dream destination before the boat capsized. Their dreams sank into the sea,” one of the migrants says.

Another Syrian migrant recounts how he rescued a baby whose mother had drowned, only for the infant to die a few hours before he was eventually rescued by the Armed Forces of Malta.

In the past year, more than 3,400 people have lost their lives attempting to cross the Mediterranean.

“These people are willing to risk everything for a chance to live in peace,” Jolie says.