DN:FILM For Sama
As its title promises, FOR SAMA is a film made for the baby daughter of one of the directors, the journalist Waad al-Kateab, whose video work on Inside Aleppo documented the atrocities of Syria’s siege of the great city. “There’s been nothing but war since the day you were born” Kateab says, in voice-over, addressing Sama, explaining that she made the film to help the girl “understand what we are fighting for.” The understanding Kateab manages to provide is dismayed, furious, proud—and crystal clear.
The doc had its roots in Kateab’s initial citizen-journalism efforts to share an unfiltered view of the street demonstrations that sought the end to Syria's dictatorship; she used her mobile phone to video events that she uploaded to social media. This grew into an always-on, always-recording practice, which continued as the siege began, Kateab capturing everything she could of her life and the activity around her. Kateab and fellow director Edward Watts had a vast archive of material: the siege, the bombings, a marriage, a pregnancy, the neighborhood children, the dinners with friends. Kateab’s camera seems to have been omnipresent, recording the sublime to the horrific, with the result that this is a film of war unlike most war films. The front lines are not covered here; instead, Kateab chronicles the ghastly siege of Aleppo, Syria, as rebels—of whom Kateab and her doctor husband are important members—are bombed, shelled and gassed into an unsurvivable pocket of the city.
Kateab is unrelenting in what she chronicles as the in-power regime with its foreign support tries to root out and destroy its civilian opposition that is desperately trying to hold its ground. Much of the doc unfolds at a DIY hospital that Kateab's husband has assembled; a filmmaker could be forgiven for presuming that a hospital stacked with the mortally wounded would be a comparatively safe place to work, to raise a baby. But the film thrums with dread: Kateab makes it brutally clear that no one she videos, no matter how cheerful or helpful or heroic or innocent, is safe to survive till the end of the film. For Sama is hard to watch: Beyond a certain point, the march of explosions and dismemberments and smears of blood and tearful children and parents weeping for their exploded parents and children works not as much as film as medicine, here to cure naivete and apathy. And as polemical as the film is, it’s not uncomplicated. Yes, the Russian forces helping President Bashar blow his own people to smithereens make for clear villains; but Kateab is acutely aware that her own actions—keeping a child in hell when there were other options—invite furious skepticism as well.
Watching the horrific prices the victims in the film pay—and imagining the prices the survivors will continue to pay for the rest of their lives—you can hardly manage to wrap your head around the simultaneous faith, optimism and despair that must have fueled the contributors to this doc. It’s not refined, its narrative logistics jolt back and forth across time—arguably a necessity in providing moments of respite before the next plunge into horror—and it's full of things most viewers have never had to see. “Film this! Film this!” screams a devastated mother who has just lost her child. “If people see this, something can happen. Why save for history?” Is this film easy to watch? Absolutely not. Important? Probably, very. Powerful beyond measure? Absolutely. This is history with the potential to save, or at the very least, illuminate.