8

The Observer

25.08.19 Cover story

Hamza and
Waad with their
newborn, Sama,
in a scene from
the documentary.

he camera focuses on Sama’s face.

She is the sweetest baby and looks,

at fi rst glance, as though her life

might be ordinary. Her eyes are a

transitory new born colour, greyish

green, waiting to turn brown. Her

gold earrings look over-large in her

tiny ears. Sama means sky in Arabic

• a sky, as her mother imagines it,
  where no bombs fall, with ordinary
  clouds and sunshine. So far, this
  is footage that could be the work
  of any doting parent, but Sama’s
  mother is journalist Waad al-Kateab
  and this is her documentary For
  Sama, fi lmed during the Syrian war.
  In the fi lm al-Kateab sings a lullaby
  that almost lulls us – if not Sama –
  into a false sense of security. Sama
  is chewing her toe investigatively,
  as babies do, when a tank shell
  explodes. It sounds like a nightmare
  next-door neighbour heaving
  heavy furniture about and there is
  a shout: “Downstairs, downstairs,
  there’s another one coming...” It is
  the summer of 2016, the beginning
  of the siege of Aleppo. The camera
  loses focus, swerves incoherently.
  Al-Kateab calmly asks someone
  to “take Sama”. By now, the shells
  are deafening.
  “This is insane – we’re getting
  this every day,” she goes on in her
  low, musical voice – her calm as
  abnormal as her situation (during
  the siege there were cluster bombs,
  chlorine gas, barrel bombs and air
  strikes). There is fi re at the end of
  their corridor and smoke pours in.
  They live in the hospital that her
  husband, Hamza, has started from
  scratch. And now they are moving
  a baby on life support and Hamza
  is shouting: “Come on! We need to
  pump the ventilators by hand.” In
  the dark, al-Kateab calls out: “Who’s
  got Sama?”
  A UN spokesman recently said

the world had become “numb to the

carnage” in Syria after more than

eight years of war and that even

the rising death toll in Idlib – the

country’s last rebel-held stronghold

• was being met by “a collective
  shrug”. No wonder al-Kateab feared
  her fi lm – which starts with the
  peaceful protests against President
  Bashar Al-Assad in 2011 and goes
  on through the Arab spring to the
  sacking of Aleppo by regime forces
  in 2016 – would be greeted with
  indifference. But the reaction has
  been unanimous and overwhelming:
  audiences in every country in which
  the fi lm has been shown stand
  and clap (at Cannes in May, they
  apparently did so for six minutes).
  Al-Kateab started out as a citizen
  journalist for Channel 4 news and
  has already been acclaimed for her
  harrowing and human series of
  reports Inside Aleppo (for which
  she has won an Emmy and the
  foreign affairs prize at the British
  journalism awards ). But this fi lm,
  dedicated to her daughter, is more
  personal. This is a mother’s fi lm
  in which the normal rhythms of
  parenthood become disrupted.
  Al-Kateab worries that nappies
  and baby formula will run out.
  Toddlers use a bombed bus as
  their playground, painting it all the
  colours of the rainbow (even little
  Sama is helped to wield a brush)
  and al-Kateab’s stoical best friend
  Afraa never loses the twinkle in her
  eye as she keeps quiet about weevils
  she fi nds in the rice. In the unreality
  of war, the domesticity startles:
  an ordinary cooking pot looks
  outlandish. But this is For Sama’s
  strength: the tender stuff of family
  life, often ignored in war reporting,
  is all there.

Interview by

Kate Kellaway

Portrait by

Pål Hansen

‘When death is all around

you, life is cheap but very

important. People in the UK

don’t know the value of life’

Waad al-Kateab’s documentary For Sama, a love letter to her daughter

born into the carnage of the Syrian civil war, has won global acclaim.

She talks about her battle to make the world understand the confl ict

Continued overleaf

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