For Sama review – an essential account of war

“Will you ever forgive me?” asks Waad Al-Khatea of her baby daughter, Sama, in an intimate voice-over. They are holed up in the hospital where they live alongside Waad’s doctor husband, Hamza, as bombs begin to fall around them, and we’re thrown into a continuous handheld camera shot that looks like something out of Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men – a room at the end of a corridor explodes, smoke pours in from another. This isn’t fiction, though; it’s the besieged city of Aleppo, Syria, at the height of the war. And yet with For Sama, you will feel a constant need to remind yourself what you’re seeing is real.

This remarkable, gripping, heart-pounding documentary – surely one of the most essential war films ever made? – was born out of filmmaker Waad Al-Khatea’s attempt to capture the slow death of her city from the initial 2011 uprising until it finally fell in 2016. A student when the war began, she started recording purely so such footage would exist and – convinced she would die in the process – had no intention of making a film. As Russian jets whizz overhead, dropping cluster bombs, it doesn’t take long to understand why.

For Sama – named for Waad’s daughter, born in the midst of this war zone – doesn’t pull any punches. As Waad and husband Hamza opt to stay behind in the crumbling city, determined not to be driven out, the horrors of war are depicted in sobering detail. This is a traumatic watch – and rightly so. Waad’s mission would have been in vein had she – and co-director Edward Watts, who helped to assemble and shape the footage – neutered or sugarcoated it. Over five years, her camera takes in everything. Lines of corpses, executed at the behest of the regime; the lifeless bodies of dead children, mourned by their inconsolable mothers; men and women mutilated by cluster bombs.

For Sama unfolds as a mostly personal account with little political context. In charge of the city’s only hospital, Hamza works tirelessly and without complaint. All the time Waad keeps recording. It is as tense as the most gripping war film. At times a seemingly banal scene comes to an unexpected end as a bomb hits nearby. Some of the footage is miraculous, best seen and not described. When Sama is born, Waad decides she is filming for her – the film is both a chronicle and an explanation. Anxiety derives from the fact we don’t quite know whether Sama will survive the chaos. And the more we get to know the others that form Waad’s circle, the less we want to; we begin fearing for their lives, too, as well as Sama’s.

For all the trauma and bloodshed, however, this is an incredibly hopeful piece of filmmaking. In spite of the situation, a semblance of normal life must continue, and so with it there is humanity. We watch as Waad and Hamza slow dance to – what else? – Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” at their wedding. Groups huddle together in basements, making jokes about the falling bombs. Elsewhere, young men laugh as they kneel next to a recently exploded shell, warming themselves on its heat. None of this is presented as pure sentimentalism. It is merely life unfolding, as it always does, in the unlikeliest of places.

★★★★★

By: Tom Barnard

Get For Sama showtimes in London.