A-Directed by Waad al-Khateab |  |
For Sama stands alongside documentaries like Citizenfour in depicting the first draft of history. The best of breed of the several Syrian Civil War docs that have chronicled a brutal and bloody period of the 21st century, Waad al-Kateab’s first-person film tracks the initial ecstatic hopes of revolutionary optimism through its fatalistic destruction in the bombed-out husk of Aleppo. For an extra dose of you-are-there urgency, al-Kateab’s husband is a doctor drowning in emergency triage and surgery at one of Aleppo’s last working hospitals, providing plenty of opportunities for all the air to be sucked out of the screening room as he holds the life of one small child after another in his hands. Al-Kateab narrates throughout, and the grief that undergirds her every sentence is less for her neighbors, because with so many of the randomly killed surrounding her, she would be unable to function if she mourned each loss. Rather, the grief is for the lost opportunity of the Arab Spring which kicked off when she was a college student and an active participant when it spread to Syria. Where once she planted gardens and laid down roots for a hopeful future, now she tunes out the constant thrum of Russian fighter jets and wonders where the next barrel bomb is going to indiscriminately land.
What keeps al-Kateab going, aside from a raging hatred of Assad, is her daughter, the titular Sama, a stunningly beautiful baby girl who’s being raised around the corpses of her peers. There might come a time in Sama’s future where she has to worry like a neighbor kid about the friend who didn’t come to play, whether it’s because he was in trouble with his parents or he just didn’t want to or because he was killed on the way over, but now she’s just a toddler who can get accustomed to anything. It soon dawns on the viewer that they might very well be watching a memorial instead of a journalistic endeavor. Tragic as it is, it’s one thing to see a kid die in a hospital who we’ve never seen before: it’d be another if Sama found herself in the wrong place at the wrong time.
There’s a hinted-at question in the film of how al-Kateab and her husband can operate in Aleppo, made apparent by talk of increased religiosity in the area that implies extremist groups are protecting them. The lack of real moderate anti-Assad forces in Syria has made that conflict a hornet’s nest of impossible-to-back bad actors, and while there’s no sense that al-Kateab and her family are jihadists, they might very well be under their umbrella. Rather than cast doubt on her work as some kind of propaganda, however, this dawning suspicion elucidates how hard it must be for the average Syrian to navigate the last decade with its alphabet-soup of groups warring against each other and against Assad. In For Sama, most of this is backgrounded for the harrowing daily struggle for survival, and it builds to one of those moments that show how badly society can break down. The family eventually finds themselves at a checkpoint with guards who have supreme power of life and death. If they choose death, there’ll be no justice or retribution, only unmarked graves. Every choice the family has made turns on this moment, potentially tilting on what the guard had for breakfast or if his wife yelled at him as he walked out the door. Al-Kateab’s camera captures all of this in an impossibly brave memoir that future historians should consider when they write the dispassionate, academic story of this time. A-
There’s a hinted-at question in the film of how al-Kateab and her husband can operate in Aleppo, made apparent by talk of increased religiosity in the area that implies extremist groups are protecting them. The lack of real moderate anti-Assad forces in Syria has made that conflict a hornet’s nest of impossible-to-back bad actors, and while there’s no sense that al-Kateab and her family are jihadists, they might very well be under their umbrella. Rather than cast doubt on her work as some kind of propaganda, however, this dawning suspicion elucidates how hard it must be for the average Syrian to navigate the last decade with its alphabet-soup of groups warring against each other and against Assad. In For Sama, most of this is backgrounded for the harrowing daily struggle for survival, and it builds to one of those moments that show how badly society can break down. The family eventually finds themselves at a checkpoint with guards who have supreme power of life and death. If they choose death, there’ll be no justice or retribution, only unmarked graves. Every choice the family has made turns on this moment, potentially tilting on what the guard had for breakfast or if his wife yelled at him as he walked out the door. Al-Kateab’s camera captures all of this in an impossibly brave memoir that future historians should consider when they write the dispassionate, academic story of this time. A-
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