Hero doc steps into Oscars limelight
Oscar-nominated The Cave tells the story of Amani Ballour, who ran hospital in Syria
She treated thousands of people in an underground hospital in a besieged rebel enclave in Syria. Now Amani Ballour, the doctor at the centre of the Oscar-nominated documentary The Cave, is stepping out into the limelight.
But the 32-year-old paediatrician, who is still haunted by the dying and mutilated children she had to treat, hopes the attention the film has garnered will remind the world that the horror of the Syrian war is about to enter its ninth year.
“For me it is not a film, it’s my life, my reality,” Dr Ballour told AFP before she obtained a visa allowing her to attend the
Oscars ceremony in Los Angeles on Sunday.
The harrowing 102minute film shows the doctor not just struggling to keep wounded children alive in her operating theatre in the former rebel
stronghold of Eastern Ghouta, but also having to deal with sexism as a woman in charge of a Syrian hospital.
“The Cave” is one of two shattering films about the conflict in the running for an Oscar alongside Waad al-Kateab’s Aleppo-set
“For Sama”, which won best documentary at the Cannes film festival in May.
“The Oscar nomination will help throw more light onto the Syrian cause, and hopefully help push people to support us,” said Ballour, who has been living in Turkey since Eastern Ghouta fell after a five-year siege in 2018.
The rebel enclave was described as “Hell on Earth” by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres as it was being pummelled by President Bashar alAssad’s forces.
With the war still raging in Syria, half a million people have been displaced in the last two months by an offensive by the Assad government and its Russian allies in the northwest of the country.
The exodus of refugees it has sparked is one of the biggest of the war.
Like millions of Syrians forced from their homes, Ballour said that she finds it difficult to be at peace with herself in exile.
“When I was at home I could help people, I was calmer despite all the difficulties, the bombardments, the hunger and the tragedies we were witnessing every day,” she said.
Instead, the young woman who has just won the Raoul Wallenberg Prize from the Council of Europe for her “exceptional humanitarian acts”, is haunted by the suffering of her thousands of child patients.