Co-directed by al-Kateab and Emmy-winning filmmaker Edward Watts, “For Sama” is a devastating scrapbook and a confessional journal of sorts. It’s also a personal cinematic endeavor as opposed to a historical crash course in the vein of “Cries From Syria,” another superb documentary on the subject, but one with different ambitions. Al-Kateab ultimately assembles her film for her baby daughter Sama to explain to her why they stayed behind. There is of course a “what if” fear baked into her pursuit to capture everything. This way, she’d at least have something to leave for her daughter in case she or her husband Hamza, a medic and a fellow freedom fighter al-Kateab meets and falls in love with at the top of their five-year journey, are abruptly killed one day.
The couple’s chosen path, pieced together in thoughtful flashbacks and accompanied by al-Kateab’s exhausted, broken voiceover, has it all—from happy moments like their disarmingly rosy wedding set against the backdrop of a crumbling city and birth of their children, to countless near-death experiences (many of them, close to impossible to watch without tears.) Al-Kateab’s footage is so you-are-there, so crushingly rich in detail that you only forget you’re watching someone else’s horror when random people break the fourth wall. In one unforgettable scene, a mother who’s recently lost her child screams at the camera, wondering why she is being filmed in a moment of such unspeakable tragedy. al-Kateab doesn’t quite respond, at least not in the footage we see. She just knows these are the events that will help tell a story one day. To her daughter and to anyone willing to listen.
Contained in that story are two young brothers bringing their third’s lifeless body to Hamza’s makeshift hospital, in tears and utmost terror. Also included are randomly bombed streets, normalized air strikes, routine mass funerals and burials, devastated communities and healthcare volunteers scrambling to make the smallest bit of difference. In what could be the film’s centerpiece—in fact, what could be the whole year’s centerpiece as 2019’s most urgently humanist piece of filmmaking—a stillborn baby comes back to life in caring and praying hands that refuse to give up. It’s simply a breathtaking experience to see a team’s shared resolve pay off in real time. A self-taught yet astonishing filmmaker, al-Kateab and her directing partner Watts braid together such everyday tragedies and miracles with all their harsh bareness, and hold on to positivity wherever they see it.
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