This is a documentary of a forty year search for missing family. Su Goldfish grew up in Trinidad believing her parents to be her only family until they moved to Australia following civil unrest in the islands. Over the years, she quizzed her father Manfred for information about his family which he was always very reluctant to share. Presently, she discovers she has half-siblings from her father's first marriage and gradually snippets of a more traumatic past emerge. As her father grew increasingly frail with old age, Su realises that her chance to piece together her family history were growing slim and sits him down for a bare-it-all conversation. He doesn't say much but Su has a large stash of his old photographs, ,home movies and a copy of the family tree they drew together before he passed away. Painstakingly she pieces together her own ancestry which takes her on a journey across the world, to places where her grandparents lived where she helps lay Stolpersteins o
About a third into the documentary, there occurs a scene which has two small boys who have just brought in their injured toddler brother and have been told that he is dead. They cannot comprehend and are shocked. We told him to come in, says the older of the boys struggling to get the words out, they were shelling us, but he didn't. And then their mother comes in and sees her child in a body bag, identifies him and gathers him up, refusing repeated offers of help to carry the body and walks out with him in her arms, wailing at her loss. This is singularly the most harrowing sequence I've ever seen on screen and warrants the warning that accompanies the British Film Board certification that the film contains footage of dead bodies. For Sama has been constructed entirely using footage that Syrian journalist Waad Al-Kateeb shot while she lived in Aleppo when it was facing the worst of Assad's assaults. She begins filming right at the start of the war when she naively belie