For Sama
Directed by: Waad Al-Khateab and Edward Watts
Documentary - 100 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 4 Nov 2019
Documentary - 100 min Reviewed by Charlie Juhl on 4 Nov 2019
Life continued to happen for Waad Al-Khateab even after Syria tore itself apart and multiple external militaries and militias began to systematically tear Aleppo apart and murder its citizens. As a student at Aleppo University, Waad began filming the early protests against Bashar al-Assad and the initial atrocities the regime inflicted upon the city. Later, amidst the carnage, indiscriminate bombing, and starvation, Waad got married and had a baby girl, Sama. She started narrating scenes in Sama’s first year of life in the makeshift hospital the family lived in. She talks to Sama during their frequent sprints to the basement during Russian air raids, about what life is like now trying to save the endless stream of women and children flowing into the hospital, and voices a monologue of whether or not Waad is doing right or wrong by Sama keeping her in harm's way instead of fleeing the near certain death of the whole family.
For Sama is necessary. This is first-person documentation of what life is like in Aleppo as Russia and the Syrian regime drop the most imprecise of munitions knowing full well they will maim and kill children. There are gruesome and gut-wrenching scenes of toddlers cut, punctured, bleeding, and dying. To most of us, Syria is a series of newspaper articles and maybe a 60 Minutes segment. For Sama is a collective slap to our sanitized news filters of the truth. It’s terrible to watch, but look, wailing mothers carry their dead two year-olds out of this hospital on a routine basis. All of this so al-Assad may keep his foot on the neck of Syria and Russia may maintain a client state in the Middle East.
For Sama is necessary. This is first-person documentation of what life is like in Aleppo as Russia and the Syrian regime drop the most imprecise of munitions knowing full well they will maim and kill children. There are gruesome and gut-wrenching scenes of toddlers cut, punctured, bleeding, and dying. To most of us, Syria is a series of newspaper articles and maybe a 60 Minutes segment. For Sama is a collective slap to our sanitized news filters of the truth. It’s terrible to watch, but look, wailing mothers carry their dead two year-olds out of this hospital on a routine basis. All of this so al-Assad may keep his foot on the neck of Syria and Russia may maintain a client state in the Middle East.
Waad married Dr. Hamza Al-Khateab when most of Aleppo’s doctors and other professionals were busy evacuating. Hamza is one of the few doctors, who was not only an activist, but who stayed to care for the civilian collateral damage. Before Sama, and before the siege and the hospital, harbingers of the destruction to come manifested as bodes floating in the river. The regime gathered up alleged revolutionaries, tortured them, shot them in the head, and sent them down the rive so the Aleppo populace would get the message. Waad records all of it. The vast majority of western audiences has never seen footage like this. Network news does not air it and the daily cable shouting matches hardly spend any time on foreign matters while there is the latest Presidential tweet to dissect.
Time shifts back and forth between 2016 and 2013 and so forth showing us bombardments, barrel bombs, and how little by little, Aleppo shrunk from square miles to just a few city blocks. Syria’s surrounding countries and then the European Union began to squeal over the millions of Syrian refugees knocking down their barbed wire fences and pleading for asylum. This is the story of those refugees. They did not want to leave Aleppo, but if they remained, it would be their children, cut to pieces, and laying dead on the hospital floor. There is a scene which serves as the documentary’s fulcrum where a victim of another random aerial attack is nine-month pregnant woman. There is an immediate Caesarian section and we watch the doctors rub, smack, and coax the infant, who we are sure is dead, to life. It is one of the most remarkable things I have ever seen. If you were ambivalent about Syria and Russia murdering its citizens before this, you will not be if you witness how that baby comes into the world.
Edited into the spaces of the Aleppo slaughterhouse is Waad’s version of a love story. There is her barebones wedding and the couple’s first house where they take it personally when shrapnel shreds their little garden. Waad is at first excited and then dreads her pregnancy. How could anyone in this situation willingly bring a child into it? There is also her choice to stay which she recognizes will reign judgment down upon her. To stay or to run. Waad juxtaposes her unfathomable choice to stay in the most stark and borderline exploitative ways. She films Sama and then shows a dead boy, about the same age as Sama, whose body lays still a mere few feet away. By staying, we are sure Waad hands her little girl a death sentence.
I have no sympathy anyone who says For Sama is too graphic or too easily offends delicate sensibilities. This happened. The world stood by and let Russian and Syrian helicopters slice and dice the children of parents who wanted freedom. Waad earns her fair share of scrutiny by making her daughter front and center of the story and a waiting casualty of the next assault. But her film showing her story and her city is crucial right now. I suspect nothing will change on the ground in Syria because of this film, and that shows more about the rest of the world than about Waad's movie. This is what the world will accept. We will let this happen again and again. For Sama is our cinematic conscience. It details in blood, gore, and body parts what we will continue to tolerate.
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