10
The Observer
25.08.19 Cover storyAlready garlanded with awards
including best documentary at the
Cannes and SXSW fi lm festivals
and a special jury prize at Hot Docs,
For Sama also shows what it is to
destroy a family. We see mothers
in fi erce, tearless overdrive, like
fi gures from Shakespearean tragedy.
One mother searching for her son,
Mohammad, gives us the fi lm’s most
revealing line. On fi nding his dead
body she postpones the evidence of
what she sees, crying hysterically:
“It’s Mummy, I’ve got your milk,
wake up!” At this moment, she
sees al-Kateab fi lming. What you
expect her to say is: “How dare you?”
Instead, she screams at the top of
her voice: “Film this!”
“My lens,” al-Kateab says now ,
“was, for her, the world outside. She
wanted her grief witnessed.”
L
ast week – three years
later – a small girl skips
along the corridor of
a photographic studio
in north London,
holding the hand of a
babysitter. “Where’s Mama?” she
calls out. Sama is about to join her
mother and have her picture taken.
She does several experimental twirls
in her fl owery frock and puts on her
shoes with satisfaction. The moment
comes to comb her hair: Mama must
do it. Sama prefers not to stand still.
Asked how old she is, she holds up
three fi ngers, eyes shining. She is
an enchanting child , extraordinarily
animated. Her mother, beautiful and
immaculately dressed – responding
to her daughter at every turn – is
still by contrast. Looking at them
after having seen the fi lm, one feels
a marvelling gratitude that they
have survived. It seems bordering
on unreal that she and her family
have swapped east Aleppo for east
London (she is currently employed
by Channel 4 News/ITN).
The family was compelled to
leave Syria on 21 December 2016
(the city’s sixth month under
siege). Hamza was recognised – as
manager of the only surviving
hospital and responsible for civilian
healthcare in east Aleppo’s last
besieged quarter – to be one of
the most signifi cant fi gures in the
civilian administration area and it
was he who received the phone call
from the UN with a message from
the Russians to say that if those
remaining in Aleppo wanted to
survive, they must surrender and
go into exile immediately. Al-Kateab
asks in the fi lm: “Sama, will you
remember Aleppo? Will you blame
me for staying here? Or blame me
for leaving now?” They had never
intended to leave. And, in one sense
al-Kateab (not her real name, she
uses the pseudonym to protect her
relatives) has never left: she brought
Syria with her to the UK, arriving
with a dozen hard drives initially
cut down to 300 hours of footage –
which she then spent two years, with
fellow director Edward Watts (an
independent fi lm-maker who has
made more than 20 documentaries),
editing into their 95-minute fi lm.
Watching her having her picture
taken, she seems professional
and aloof – as if elsewhere (as she
presumably feels she is). But as she
sits down beside me on a small sofa,
that changes. Attentive and warm,
she pats my arm to emphasise her
points. “I fi lmed everything,” she
explains. Selecting material for the
fi lm, the challenge was to achieve
a balance between “dark and light,
life and death”. At fi rst, she had felt
adamant that showing the worst
was what mattered: her footage
was “evidence”. But then, as Watts
explains on the phone, they ran an
early test screening at Channel 4, for
friends and family – “just 15 people
or so” – and realised they had “gone
too far into the darkness.”
Their fi rst cut was in
chronological order. It started with
hope, descended into despair. This,
they realised, did not work. It is
hard to imagine more devastating
images than those shown in the
fi lm, but al-Kateab and Watts insist
many were worse – including “a
pile of very young children’s dead
bodies” abandoned at a hospital.
The audience could not cope and
sometimes, during editing, Watts
had found himself putting his hand
in front of the screen. They had to
think again. Hundreds of thousands
of people have been killed in the
Syrian war and more than 10 million
displaced, and while audiences
needed to be aware of “carnage en
masse”, this had not to be at the
expense of individual dignity.
The collaboration between
al-Kateab and Watts started
uncertainly because they were in
different countries: she was in
Turkey (where her family spent a
year after fl eeing Syria), he was in
London. She applied for asylum in
the UK on the basis that she and
Hamza were targets for reprisals
by the regime and on the strength
of their work for Channel 4 news
and in east Aleppo. Her story had
received attention in parliament
during the 2016 siege and with
the backing of Channel 4 News,
her case was swiftly processed.
Making the fi lm, al-Kateab had
been understandably nervous
that a foreigner might falsify
or appropriate her emotional
copyright. But nowadays, she
happily declares that, while most
collaborators “start together and
end apart”, she and Watts went the
opposite way. It was Watts who had
the brainwave to make Sama the
key to structuring the fi lm and they
discovered that, with a fl ashback
format, they could move between
dark and light, with Sama as their –
and our – lifeline. And, by this stage,
the fi lm was becoming a love story.
It begins with 18-year-old
al-Kateab (she is 26 now) about
to study economics at Aleppo
university. Hamza is a close friend
but married to someone else. She
describes him as having the gift of
making her feel safe with “a constant
smile on his face”. One of the few
doctors in Aleppo who is also an
activist, his smile is to be tested in
the years that follow. East Aleppo
lacks schools and emergency and
medical services – thus the urgentneed for his hospital. We watch him
at work: a confi dence-inspiring
hero – his makeshift hospital run,
extraordinarily impressively, partly
on willpower. In the weeks before
they leave the country, the hospital
(Hamza’s second after the fi rst was
destroyed by bombs) performed 890
operations in 20 days and received
6,000 wounded people.
On e scene shows a massacre in
east Aleppo. Al-Kateab fi lms the rows
of bodies hauled out of a river – like
a dormitory for the dead. Heads
stick out of the tops of blue sleeping
bags, awaiting identifi cation. These
civilians have been handcuffed,
tortured and executed. Their crime?
They lived in “areas opposed to the
regime”. Hamza’s smile has gone but
his composure is holding. As corpses
are thrown in makeshift shrouds
into a mass grave, there is high and
defi ant singing: “Our dead have gone
to paradise.”
When Hamza’s wife urges him
to fl ee the country, he chooses
Syria over his fi rst marriage. Armed
rebels by this point have freed the
city but retaliation is intensifying.
Al-Kateab’s camera repeatedly shows
terrible smoke on the horizon, rising
above the city’s brick buildings like
grey plumage. She explains that
she started fi lming on a mobile,
graduated to a camera and even
borrowed a drone from a friend (she
had trouble learning to use it but
eventually got superb results).
Hamza has come up with a rule
for the two of them: no crying in
hospital. “He explained that peopleWhen Sama
was born I was
terrifi ed about
the future but
also so happy.
I could see
Hamza’s and
my story in
her face
Continued from page 8saw me as powerful because I
was fi lming and believed in the
revolution. If they saw me break
down, however strong they might
be, it would weaken them. And
Hamza felt he had to have strength
for everyone. He was a leader.”
Hospital staff used to tell her: “We’re
very strong because of Hamza – he
is very cool.”
But one day, watching an attempt
to save a boy’s life, al-Kateab cannot
help herself. Hamza ticks her off:
“You can’t cry in here – get out.” But
then he goes after her. It is striking
how often in the fi lm people ask one
another: “What’s wrong?” It seems
a redundant question, the answer
everywhere to be seen. Al-Kateab
agrees but explains: “It’s about care.
Even though I might know you have
lost your child, it’s my way of asking
what’s going on in your heart.”
Hamza told her: “Don’t you realise
I’m in love with you? Will you marry
me?” The fi lm answers his question
with footage of their wedding:
Hamza in black suit and lilac tie,
Waad in a veil with white silk roses
in her hair. Confetti falls through
the air, as though there might still
be room for a fairytale in Aleppo. It
is one of the rare times the camera
is not in al-Kateab’s hands. They
dance to Willie Nelson’s Crazy and
Hamza tells her: “This is the road
we’re taking, it is a long road full of
danger and fear but freedom waits
for us at the end.” The tenderness of
the dancing is offset by what is, in a
sense, their most dangerous wedding
vow: “Come, let’s walk it together.”