Filmed over 5 years and culled from 500 hours of footage over 2 more, For Sama is journalist Waad Al-Khateab’s first-hand account of the Syrian civil war. Co-directed by Al-Khateab and Edward Watts, it’s, on one level, a letter from Al-Khateab to her young daughter Sama justifying why she and her doctor husband, Hamza, stayed in Aleppo even as the city deteriorated. On another, it’s an unbelievably powerful record of history as it happened that feels like an entirely new type of documentary filmmaking.
Before going into For Sama, it’s vital that a viewer understand just how upsetting some of its images can be. Al-Khateab presents both everyday life and the war’s violence with striking frankness. Her wedding to Hamza plays with the same straightforwardness as images of the bodies of torture victims found floating in a river and at 100 minutes, the film can be a lot to endure. That said, while so much blood and sadness will keep some viewers away, it’s important to note that because For Sama is often so bleak, its moments of genuine hope and humanity are even more effective.
By far the film’s most heart wrenching scene comes when a woman who was injured in an explosion and is nine months pregnant is brought into the hospital. When her baby first emerges from the womb via caesarean, he’s blue and sickeningly still. The harder the medical staff works to revive him, the more you can feel the audience begin to fall apart. But then, when the baby suddenly opens his eyes both the people on screen and the audience audibly react with joy and relief.
Still, as striking as individual scenes are, it’s the way Al-Khateab captures how Aleppo and the people who live there change over time that’s most remarkable. When the film starts, Waad and Hamza are just friends—he’s even married to another woman. Both they and the rebels we see at the war’s beginning are ecstatic and the city’s untouched vibrancy matches their optimism. As the years progress, though, Waad, Hamza and their friends become hardened, slowly worn down by constant fear and violence and the city’s slow disintegration into gray rubble feels like the visual expression of their fading hopes.
By far the film’s most memorable signs of the way life in Aleppo changes, however, are the children Al-Khateab films. Though most of the moments are small, the weight of their meaning feels crushing. Take the moment when Waad and Sama are alone in their permanent home in the hospital Hamza runs and an explosion goes off. While Waad jumps at the sound, Sama doesn’t even react. Or, take the moment when the little girl of one of the Al-Khateabs’ friends asks her father to tell her a story about a boy and it turns out to be a sort of parable meant to remind the girl what to do when she hears a bomb coming. Perhaps most incredible, though, is a scene where the son of those same friends begins to cry as he explains that even with the constant explosions, he doesn’t want to leave Aleppo.
“Children have nothing to do with this,” laments one doctor after two small boys watch their little brother die on a gurney. And purely in terms of the conflict between the rebels living in Aleppo and the Assad regime, that’s true, but by the time For Sama ends, it’s clear that in the abstract sense, the children are the whole point. Why do Hamza and Waad walk back into Aleppo with Sama strapped to Hamza’s chest despite knowing they may never get out alive again? As Waad herself explains in the film’s final moments, because they believe their work is vital to creating a better Syria for her and any children they may have. And while their eventual exile means they now can’t actively be involved in changing Syria, perhaps the film about their effort will keep that work going.
