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 believes that the rebel forces will win. She joins a band of others resisting the regime including a handsome doctor Hamza whom she would fall in love with, gets married to and has a child with - all against the backdrop of steadily worsening war. The narrative flips back and forth recalling happier wildly optimistic times to a present which is almost unbearable to watch.
The film is a love letter that Waad writes to her daughter Sama who grows up amongst unrelenting shelling and rocket attacks. She films at the hospital where her husband works, which they have to keep moving as it keeps getting destroyed. 'The children don't deserve this,' cries one of Hamza's colleagues after yet another blood bath 'they have done nothing.' Child after child is brought in, hand severed, bullet pierced, ashen faced and blood soaked. And through it all, Waad keeps filming.
The children in Aleppo paint buses which were burnt out from cluster bombs and ask their father for bed time stories about the boy who lost his parents to a rocket bomb attack. Ingenious women run schools in basements and talk about feeding the kids as they would be hungry and how they cannot learn Maths on an empty stomach. A mother cooks meals for her family after thoroughly cleaning out the rice that is infested with weevils. Some men warm their hands on the shells that have just landed on the floor after puncturing a hole through the roof. Those left behind defiantly carry on life as normal as possible, singing songs and celebrating birthdays. Squeezing joy out of dire circumstances.
Amidst all the unceasing death and destruction comes one extraordinary sequence when a woman who is nine months pregnant is brought in after being hit by a shrapnel. Emergency caesarean is performed and the unresponsive newborn is slapped in an attempt to bring it back to life. What good is the child's life if it means a life of relentless assault? But then, if the child survived, it could offer hope and redemption.
Waad, Hamza come back to Aleppo from a short break in Turkey just as the roads going out the city are closing up. They voluntarily go back into the siege as walking away would be unthinkable, it would mean all the years of fighting would have been for nothing. In her narration, Waad tells her daughter that she did it for her and for children like her.
For Sama documents the daily reality of living under a sky that poured fire on its own people. Sama means 'sky', a more gentle, cloud-filled sky that her mother longs for. It is a story of courage, of love, hope, piercing pain and glorious joy played out against the most horrific atrocities that the world looked away from. The film shows the people who stayed and fought, whose courage is not the absence of fear but the inability to surrender to it and the compulsion to carry on, in spite of it.
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 believes that the rebel forces will win. She joins a band of others resisting the regime including a handsome doctor Hamza whom she would fall in love with, gets married to and has a child with - all against the backdrop of steadily worsening war. The narrative flips back and forth recalling happier wildly optimistic times to a present which is almost unbearable to watch.
The film is a love letter that Waad writes to her daughter Sama who grows up amongst unrelenting shelling and rocket attacks. She films at the hospital where her husband works, which they have to keep moving as it keeps getting destroyed. 'The children don't deserve this,' cries one of Hamza's colleagues after yet another blood bath 'they have done nothing.' Child after child is brought in, hand severed, bullet pierced, ashen faced and blood soaked. And through it all, Waad keeps filming.
The children in Aleppo paint buses which were burnt out from cluster bombs and ask their father for bed time stories about the boy who lost his parents to a rocket bomb attack. Ingenious women run schools in basements and talk about feeding the kids as they would be hungry and how they cannot learn Maths on an empty stomach. A mother cooks meals for her family after thoroughly cleaning out the rice that is infested with weevils. Some men warm their hands on the shells that have just landed on the floor after puncturing a hole through the roof. Those left behind defiantly carry on life as normal as possible, singing songs and celebrating birthdays. Squeezing joy out of dire circumstances.
Amidst all the unceasing death and destruction comes one extraordinary sequence when a woman who is nine months pregnant is brought in after being hit by a shrapnel. Emergency caesarean is performed and the unresponsive newborn is slapped in an attempt to bring it back to life. What good is the child's life if it means a life of relentless assault? But then, if the child survived, it could offer hope and redemption.
Waad, Hamza come back to Aleppo from a short break in Turkey just as the roads going out the city are closing up. They voluntarily go back into the siege as walking away would be unthinkable, it would mean all the years of fighting would have been for nothing. In her narration, Waad tells her daughter that she did it for her and for children like her.
For Sama documents the daily reality of living under a sky that poured fire on its own people. Sama means 'sky', a more gentle, cloud-filled sky that her mother longs for. It is a story of courage, of love, hope, piercing pain and glorious joy played out against the most horrific atrocities that the world looked away from. The film shows the people who stayed and fought, whose courage is not the absence of fear but the inability to surrender to it and the compulsion to carry on, in spite of it.
...
"you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land"
- from Home by Warsan Shire
Title: For Sama
Duration: 1 hr 40
Director: Waad al-Kateab
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