Syrian film-maker Waad al-Kateab documents both the city’s violent siege and the birth of her daughter
There is a scene in the middle of this powerful, harrowing and deeply human documentary about life under siege in Aleppo, Syria, that perfectly encapsulates its mixture of horror and hope. In the terrible aftermath of yet another airstrike, a pregnant woman with broken limbs and shrapnel in her belly is brought into a makeshift theatre in al-Quds hospital. An emergency caesarean brings her critically unresponsive child into this world of carnage – a terrible, pitiable sight, made all the more unwatchable by the certainty that nothing so vulnerable could possibly survive such violence. Syrian citizen-journalist and mother Waad al-Kateab, whose frontline footage was seen in Channel 4 News’s Inside Aleppo reports, keeps filming, determined to bring such daily atrocities to the attention of the world. And then, as the spectacle seems too cruel to endure, a miracle occurs, offering a gasping glimpse of redemption amid this unfolding hell.
There are many moments in For Sama when audiences will want to look away, not least because so many of the victims being dragged out of ravaged buildings or laid out on blood-soaked floors are children. These are kids who have grown up amid a cacophony of deafening explosions to which they no longer react; whose earliest words include “air raid” and “cluster bomb”; who play among the wreckage of burnt-out buses; and whose young friends have either moved away or died. The documentary itself is addressed and dedicated to a child – Waad’s daughter, Sama – whom we first meet as smoke fills the corridors of the hospital in which she lives, while her mother cries: “Who’s got my girl? Where’s my girl?”
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