‘We need action for the people of Syria’
This week, young film-maker Waad al-kateab releases an extraordinary documentary, filmed as she raised her baby daughter in war-torn Aleppo
A young woman stands in a hospital in East Aleppo, Syria, filming a scene of chaos. A bomb has gone off nearby and bodies are being rushed in; the floor is drenched in blood. The camera pans around to a hysterical woman standing next to her son’s tiny dead body. She’s crying: ‘Wake up, I beg you. It’s Mummy, I’ve got your milk.’
When she notices the camera, the woman shouts: ‘Are you filming?’ Then gestures to the sky, and screams, ‘Why are they doing this to us? Film this!’ Waad al-kateab, 28, is the film-maker, and she’s documenting the destruction to show the world what Syrians are living through.
When civil war broke out in 2011, Waad starting filming – initially, as a student during the Arab Spring and then as a citizen journalist, as the city revolted against President Bashar al Assad’s regime. She started by using her mobile, then got a small camera, which she hid inside her bag, recording through a hole. If the regime had caught her, she could have been killed.
She filmed ‘every hour, every day’ for five years – through air strikes and shelling as the city lived under siege. Against this dramatic backdrop, Waad falls in love, loses friends, gets married and has a baby girl named Sama.
Now, she and fellow director Edward Watts have condensed her five years of footage into a 96-minute film, For Sama, which is narrated as a video diary for her daughter. Sama’s first years are marked by war. At one point, Waad notes that she doesn’t cry like a normal child. In another, she says, ‘Sama, you’re the most beautiful thing in our life – but what a life I’ve brought you into.’
She says it was important for her to stay in the war zone and film because she knew ‘life could end at any moment. It’s our memory, our history as Syrians and it needed to be saved’. She also did it because she hopes the world will see and try and stop it happening.
After eight years of war, Assad has won back control of most of Syria, and has now set his sights on the area of Idlib. ‘We need action for the people there,’ says Waad. ‘We can’t just watch without doing something.’
There were many times when she was tempted to stop, but she said she had little time to reflect on what she was doing. She kept thinking, ‘Whatever I film now, this will be the last thing I capture before I’m killed. I’m so proud that I was able to present the female perspective. There are great male journalists, but I was the only female journalist there.’
Her husband Hamza, a doctor, set up a hospital in Aleppo. In the film, we watch as an injured boy is brought in after an
airstrike. His two brothers’ tear-stained faces peer out from behind a curtain as their brother is covered with a sheet. The doctors shake their heads.
‘I want to make people really understand what war means,’ says Waad. ‘You don’t know what life means until you see death.’ Of the woman who lost her son, she says she ‘felt that the camera might rescue her and take her out of this disaster’.
Waad’s story is not unusual; hundreds of thousands of Syrians have experienced the same. Last week, a pictured emerged of young Syrian children returning for their new term to a bombed out school.
It seems unthinkable that Waad and Hamza chose to stay in Aleppo during the siege, raising a young child, but their sense of duty to document and provide medical help was unshakeable. Waad says the most terrifying moment came when they decided to leave – when the regime closed in on the city in December 2016.
We watch as they drive away from an apocalyptically bombed-out Aleppo, Waad hiding years of video footage underneath her coat with Sama on her lap as they drive through regime checkpoints. Calling the film For Sama isn’t just Waad diarising the events for her daughter; it’s about symbolising hope for the next generation.
‘It means we did everything for a new life, a new generation. It’s for Sama and all the children of Syria, to understand what happened and how that happened, and what we were doing when that happened. We hope the future will be better for them.’ ‘For Sama’ will show in cinemas from 13 September, and on Channel 4 in the autumn. For details on nationwide film-maker Q&A previews of ‘For Sama’ , please go to forsamafilm.com