Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Mybaby,you have been bombed all of your life... will you ever forgive me?
cleaners, pharmacists and nurses. We realise before she does the doctor who makes “me feel safe and has a constant smile on his face” is in love with her.
At her basement wedding reception she wears a borrowed dress with plastic flowers and dances in the dark.
Their love makes the losses harder to bear. The scores of bodies dredged from a river, handcuffed and with gun wounds to their heads, after a massacre the regime insisted did not happen.
Two weeping boys peer through a makeshift curtain as their brother who was caught in shelling by their own regime is pronounced dead.
A mum runs to the hospital to search for her son but finds him in a body bag. She clutches him as she dashes back through bombed-out streets.
In March 2015, Waad films around her first home. Soon it will be destroyed. We see the line appear on her pregnancy test and her practising “Hamza, I’m pregnant” in the mirror.
And her tears of joy as, in a makeshift operating theatre, she is handed her little girl bundled in pink blankets.
Sama means sky in Arabic – a sky, her mum imagines, where no bombs fall. But during the summer of 2016, when the regime and their allies put Aleppo under siege, the hospital is bombed.
Waad films as monitors in intensive care flicker and babies are rushed to safety with tubes flailing as Hamza urges his colleagues to pump ventilators by hand. Two colleagues, considered to be family, are killed.
He finds another building and starts new hospital as soldiers draw closer. We see piles of bodies. Blood-soaked floors. Children’s faces streaming after gas attacks. “Sometimes we even cry blood,” says Waad.
Sama grows until we see her first teeth and the way she does not flinch when another shell rattles the walls of the one room they call their home.
“When I hear Russian warplanes, the sound cuts through me,” says Waad. “Sama, I know you understand what is happening. I can see it in your eyes. You never cry like a normal baby would. That’s what breaks my heart.
“I’m scared of dying. But what scares me most is losing you.”
Waad and Hamza never intended to leave, even when the soldiers were less than a mile from the hospital, while water and food ran out.
But on December 21, 2016, during the sixth month under siege, Hamza receives a message from the Russians. Anyone in Aleppo who wants to live must surrender and go into exile.
Waad says: “Will you remember Aleppo? Will you blame me for staying here? Or blame me for leaving now?”
By the time they leave Hamza has performed 890 operations in 20 days and received 6,000 wounded people.
When the family approach a checka point, there is fear for Hamza, who is recognised for sending news reports.
“Hamza. Hamza, we made it,” says Waad, who is pregnant again as her family enter a new world. After 18 months in Turkey, the family and baby girl Taima were granted UK residency and Waad works for Channel 4.
She brought more than 500 hours of film back, expertly edited by documentary maker Edward Watts, to create this love story to Sama and to Syria and a plea for peace.
No matter who graces the Oscars red carpet, none deserve the attention more than brave four-year-old Sama. And Waad knows just being alive with her family means she has already won.
www.actionforsama.com