A shockingly raw combination of first-person reporting and personal video diary, For Sama comprises footage that journalist Waad Al-Kateab took while under siege in Aleppo at the start of the Syrian civil war, alongside her doctor husband, Hamza, and newborn daughter, Sama. (Al-Kateab is credited as co-director along with Edward Watts.) As the title implies, Al-Kateab narrates, to Sama, the years they spent enduring shelling by the forces of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad and bombardment by Russian planes. “We had no idea how quickly our lives would be swept away,” she says over footage of the early days of protests, circa 2011, when she was a university student. For Sama jumps around a bit in time, adding narrative sophistication, while the intimate nature of the project allows for moments that would likely be left out of an embedded news report. I think of Hamza defiantly watering the few flowers in their garden that have survived another shelling, covered in dust. Or him playing peekaboo with Sama in a bomb shelter, using a surgical mask to hide his face. Other images are more enraging and demoralizing, as when Al-Kateab’s camera traces a smear of blood down the hallway that Hamza has established until she arrives at the decimated body from which it’s spilling. Or the graphic emergency C-section performed on another shelling victim that results, against all visual evidence to the contrary, in a miracle baby. Be warned that some of the imagery here depicts unvarnished human suffering of an almost incomprehensible kind. “You never cry like a normal baby would,” Al-Kateab says as Sama sits blankly in the semi-dark amidst the cacophony of exploding missiles. “That’s what breaks my heart.”
(11/27/2023)