For Sama Evaluate

For Sama takes al-Kateab’s footage, interspersed with drone imagery of Aleppo looking increasingly battered, to chart the conflicts between 2012 and 2016 when the documentarian fled Syria with her husband Hamza and infant daughter Sama. The latter is the film’s raison d’être: a video diary/letter from mother to daughter explaining not only the conflict but perhaps more importantly why her parents made the (on the surface, baffling) choices they made. For Sama poses tough questions — why would you bring a child into this living, breathing nightmare? Why wouldn’t you just run? — and al-Kateab and Watts’ compelling film provides the answers. And then some.

 

In 2012, al-Kateab was a twenty-something studying economics at Aleppo University when she started documenting the growing protests against president Bashar al-Assad’s oppressive dictatorship, filled with that student sense of militant optimism. As the years go by and al Assad’s regime, aided by Russian money and warplanes, becomes more horrific, al-Kateab continues to film, her camera detailing the uncertainty and panic that filled every minute of her day. The unforgettable moments come thick and fast — the time al Assad’s forces are one street away; a tense nighttime drive to get through a regime checkpoint; and most amazingly, when a doctor conducts a Caesarean section to remove a dead baby from its wounded mother’s womb. What happens next is one of the most miraculous things to appear in a cinema this year.