Mark Reviews Movies: FOR SAMA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 25, 2019

Most of those reading this will be fortunate enough not to have experienced military conflict. Of those who have, even fewer will have experienced it unwillingly, as a civilian caught up in the chaos and horror of armed conflict over whatever political squabble, border dispute, or whims of a murderous dictator may have spurred violence. For most people, the idea of being trapped in familiar surroundings, suddenly transformed into bedlam by the constant sound and presence of gunshots and explosions, is unthinkable.

Try to think of such a situation, though. Think of your home, so safe and comfortable, suddenly looking like the last place you'll ever be—and knowing that end could come much sooner than you thought possible.

Think of realizing that your home might be last place you want to be—that leaving it for the unknown might be the only chance for the survival of you and your loved ones. Think of having to make such a decision—to stay and risk death, to leave and possibly never return, to decide to split up a family, to determine who should stay and who should go. For most, such ideas will remain as a harmless thought experiment—a theoretical line of questions that will never have to be answered or a hypothetical scenario that one can be thankful to never experience.

For Sama, the remarkable documentary from co-directors Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts, is no thought experiment. It does not ask us to consider what it might be like to live amidst military conflict. The film simply puts us right into the middle of it, from the perspective of a young woman—a journalist, an activist, a daughter, a wife, and, most importantly to the film's central narrative, the mother of a daughter whose first year of life is entirely defined by death, destruction, fear, and uncertainty.

The film, almost exclusively shot by Kateab over a period of five years—from 2011 to 2016—in Aleppo, is many things. It's a personal diary of what it is like to live in the middle of an armed conflict. It's a war diary, in that Kateab is on one side of the fight—against the regime of Bashar al-Assad and his Russian allies—as a non-violent activist, although, at a certain point during the siege on Aleppo during the Syrian civil war, there are only the sides of those targeted for killing and the ones doing the targeting.

It's a lament for this city, once a bustling place where people could work and study and live, and its inhabitants, who understood the threat to their freedom to live as they want from the Assad government, protested its abuses, and then spent four years making impossible choices, losing their lives and loved ones to rockets and bombs, and trying, even through all of that, to maintain hope that life would continue—and might even be better than it had been. It's a testament to the courage, compassion, and selflessness of those who remained behind, despite having options to leave Aleppo, and risked or sometimes lost their lives to help others.

This film's existence is something of a miracle. It provides a straightforward timeline of the fall of Aleppo, from the early days of student protests, when Kateab was studying at the local university, to a time five years later, when Kateab, as well as her family and surviving friends, are given one final chance to leave and survive, abandoning their cause of documenting the conflict and running one of the few hospitals—and, by the end, the last one—in the city. In between, Kateab and those near to her endure airstrike after airstrike, as their friends and colleagues are killed and, at one point, a rocket—thankfully a dud—blasts through the wall of the hospital, next to a room where her daughter spends most of her days and nights.

Those wounded and killed in the attacks arrive, and the filmmakers make no effort to shield us from the results of such carnage. The concept of ethical documentary filmmaking, which might suggest that such images of the dead shouldn't be presented (lest those people in the imagery are or appear to be exploited), is pointless here. We have to see it, if only to comprehend what happened as much as is possible. A mother, whose son is killed in a rocket attack, speaks for everyone, perhaps, when she sees Kateab and simply shouts, "Film this!"

We have seen such images before, from other films and news reports, but we haven't quite witnessed the level of severity and horror as is seen here, such as a shot in which Kateab is able to capture emergency surgery being performed within the reflection of blood pooled on the floor. This fact alone imbues the film with a degree of significance, in terms of it existing as a visceral, contemporary account of a war that is still going. For those who question the acts of the regime or the role of Assad's allies, here, once again, is visual evidence of terrible atrocities, perpetrated against civilians. The film's testament will, at least, last far longer than those who enacted such violence.

The most extraordinary part of the film—beyond its immediacy and its determination to show what happened as it actually happened—is Kateab's own resolve to make herself part of the story. It's an objective document of war, yes, but it is also, painfully a subjective account of what it is like to be in war. As her own life proceeds as the violence escalates, she finds some happiness with Hamza, a local doctor who becomes her husband and a regular presence on television news (making him a target of the regime), and gives birth to a daughter.

Through narration, the filmmaker is bluntly honest about her feelings. There's this strange paradox, not only to her life but also to the lives of some close friends, of trying to maintain some semblance of normalcy for the children who remain, even though there is nothing normal about this. The whole film is framed as a lengthy letter to Kateab's daughter Sama, who will one day know where she came from, what happened to the place of her birth, and why her parents did what they did.

Will she understand it, though? Throughout For Sama, Kateab questions everything, and the horrible part is that there are no correct answers to such questions, only consequences. One is that Sama, who has lived with the sounds of gunfire and explosions since her birth, does not even flinch when a bomb goes off near her small room in the hospital. Try, just try, to think of that. It's almost unimaginable. This film shows us with heartbreaking, crushing clarity.

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