‘For Sama’ reveals the true horror and fleeting beauty of life in Aleppo
For more than five years, Waad al-Kateab and her husband Hamza risked their lives to film inside a war-stricken hospital in Aleppo. Against all odds, they’re still alive. They talk to Stephen Applebaum
When Waad al-Kateab used her mobile phone to film anti-Assad protests at her university in Aleppo, the burgeoning revolution, galvanised by the wave of popular unrest sweeping through the Middle East, looked like the beginning of a new era for Syrians. Getting to this point hadn’t been easy in a country where opposing the regime could result in imprisonment, beatings and death. At last, though, it felt like people power might loosen president Bashar al-Assad’s stranglehold, bringing the dignity and freedom citizens longed for within reach.
“We were very optimistic that we could change not just our life in Syria,” al-Kateab tells me, in a bright and cavernous dining area at ITN’s HQ in London, “but change the world, and do amazing things. Unfortunately,” she adds, with the understatement of someone who has seen more horror than most of us can imagine, “everything went the wrong way”.
Growing up, al-Kateab had dreamed of becoming a journalist. Her parents, though, pointed out the difficulty of doing the job in a country like Syria, and she opted to study economics and marketing instead. In 2011, she joined the demonstrations, and quickly became a version of what she’d always wanted to be.
Over the next five years, having acquired a camera, she filmed her own life and the lives of people around her as they built a community outside the government’s control in rebel-held east Aleppo – instead of fleeing for a better life. When the forces of the regime and their Russian allies eventually closed in, they were given an ultimatum: leave, or suffer the consequences.
Al-Kateab and her husband Hamza – a doctor who set up a hospital, al-Quds, in east Aleppo, which also became their home – went into exile with their daughter and then-unborn baby, and claimed asylum in the UK.
In October 2017, reports filmed by al-Kateab for Channel 4 News during the June-December 2016 siege of Aleppo won an International Emmy. By then, she’d already begun to collaborate on a new project with the British Emmy-winning filmmaker Edward Watts (Escape from Isis), having been “match-made” by C4 after someone asked her if she had any unused footage. “Yeah,” she’d said. “All of this.”
“This” was an extraordinary trove of material spanning half a decade. In it, al-Kateab had captured the raw, quotidian details of life in a conflict. Her unflinching eye bore witness to the brutality of the Assad regime and its Russian partners, and to the resilience of ordinary Syrians trying to survive with their humanity intact. Here was the bloodshed, carnage, death and misery that became daily features of life at the hospital, but also happier moments such as al-Kateab and Hamza’s wedding, the couple moving into a new house, time spent with friends, people joking around, children gleefully painting the carcass of a bombed bus, Hamza writing a message of love to his spouse in the snow, and her blissful discovery that she’s pregnant with their first child, Sama.
It is after this baby girl, born in the midst of war, that For Sama is named. The film is a harrowing and heartbreaking documentary that draws on all of the above. It arrives in cinemas having already accrued a slew of awards, including the Prix L’Œil d’Or for Best Documentary from this year’s Cannes Film Festival. However, for al-Kateab, whom I meet for a second time, with Hamza, after the French bash, the most gratifying result has been people’s reaction to the film.
“Cannes was something really big and one of the great steps on this journey,” she says, “but we’ve also had a lot of great things after that. One of the surprises has been that people from different places have all shared the same emotions for the film – they’re usually angry or sad and want to do something. This, for me, is the best thing, because the main reason for the film is to make a difference in people’s lives.”
The world sat on its hands as Aleppo’s besieged inhabitants cried out for help and the same is happening with Idlib, where thousands of Syrians moved seeking refuge. Each day seems to bring news of another atrocity, pushing hope further away. “I couldn’t believe when we were in Aleppo that no one would do any real action to save us and our country,” she says. “And now I can’t believe that this is happening again, after all the people [outside Syria] watched, and the people who were displaced told their stories. Why is it happening again? Why is everyone just watching?”
It’s basically a war against the people who want to live in a non-government controlled area. That’s why their main targets are bakeries, schools, hospitals
Al-Kateab admits having “a lot of guilt” being here while others continue to suffer at home, and is trying to use For Sama to persuade people with the power to act. However, Hamza confides that a visit to the UN in July had left them feeling like a lot of activists, “a little helpless and hopeless”.
For Sama, nonetheless, is damning proof from the inside of what has really been happening on the ground in Syria, and provides a powerful weapon in the fight against the regime and its supporters’ toxic propaganda and disinformation. On 30 July, in testimony before the UN Security Council, Susannah Sirkin, the head of policy for Physicians for Human Rights, mentioned the documentary as she discussed the “widespread and systematic destruction of health facilities and the killing of hundreds of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and paramedics by Syria and its Russian allies”.
The conflict has never been “a direct war between two different armies that are fighting each other,” claims Hamza. “It’s basically a war against the people who want to live in a non-government controlled area. That’s why their main targets are bakeries, schools, hospitals, because they want to break the will of the people. They want to break their resilience. They want to give a direct message that it’s impossible to live in a non-Assad controlled area.”
Fifty students were arrested and beaten – and you’ve seen all this with your own eyes – and then you come back home, you watch the formal [state] channel, and there’s nothing
The regime claims it’s just fighting terrorists. For Sama proves otherwise, argues al-Kateab. Her experience and footage is “big evidence that the people who are there are Syrians and not, as the regime was saying, all strangers and terrorists, Isis”.
Although not part of any group with a role in the fighting, she herself lived through airstrikes, barrel bombings, shelling and gunfire, and knowing that “at any moment we could be killed”. She recorded as much of what she saw as possible, hopeful but uncertain that she would still be around to decide later what to do with the footage.
That For Sama exists at all is a miracle. From the start of the uprising, Assad tried to control the narrative by cracking down on journalists and people with cameras. “You were the number one enemy for the state,” says the Syrian activist-filmmaker Saeed Al Batal, whose documentary Still Recording won the Critics’ Week Prize at 2018’s Venice Film Festival. “It was more important to kill us for the regime than killing anyone else at the beginning.”
They also tried to kill reality. Al-Kateab remembers, for example, how the official TV media covered up an incident she saw at Aleppo University. “One hour before, 50 students were arrested and beaten – and you’ve seen all this with your own eyes – and then you come back home, you watch the formal [state] channel, and there’s nothing. People are interviewed, they’re asked, ‘Did anything happen today?’, and they’re like, ‘No, everything is fine. It’s okay.’”
Filming with phones at the start, she says, “was the only way to say to the people, and to convince ourselves, that something is wrong, and either I will be with or I will be against, there is no in-between”.
At one point in For Sama, al-Kateab films a gruesome group of corpses that have been pulled from a river and laid out in a courtyard for identification. They’d all been bound, tortured and shot in the head. We’re told the last place they were reported seen alive was at a government checkpoint.
I suggest to her that this footage seems particularly valuable because forces under the control of Bashar al-Assad’s late father, president Hafez al-Assad, had ruthlessly quashed a rebellion in Hama, in 1982, by massacring 20,000 people, and apparently no photographic evidence of that existed, which had allowed the regime to repress talk about the slaughter and refer to it simply as the “incident”.
“This is one of the big reasons why we all, as Syrians, knew we needed to do this,” she says. “Because we don’t know exactly what happened in Hama, just what we hear from our families. And even our families don’t know exactly what happened. So we felt this could be a very big movement because [this time] we can save evidence, and we can prove everything. But they’re still denying everything, in a very stupid way.”
Hamza agrees: “When the revolution started in 2011, we thought, ‘It’s not Hama, 1982. There is media. We have mobile phones. We have the internet. The people of the world will know about what’s going on.’ But,” he sighs, “it’s the same result.”
The couple didn’t meet until the revolution, and had they not been swept up by events would have followed their separate plans to work outside Syria. “For most of our generation that was the dream,” says Hamza, “because you can’t build your dreams in a country that is ruled just by one family.”
It’s like we’re on a farm, and the owner of the farm is al-Assad’s family, and we’re the animals on the farm. It’s not just how we saw ourselves. It’s how we were really
Syria was everywhere referred to as “Assad’s Syria”, and not even kids were allowed to forget who was in charge. When Al-Kateab was in primary school, pupils were called “Cubs”, she recalls, because in Arabic Assad means lion; in secondary school, they were automatically enrolled into the Ba’ath Party; finally, after university, if someone wanted to just live peacefully within the system, they’d work, eat, and not talk about the government.
“It’s like we’re on a farm,” says al-Kateab, “and the owner of the farm is al-Assad’s family, and we’re the animals on the farm.” I have heard this description before. Is that actually how Syrians in general saw themselves? “It’s not just how we saw ourselves,” she insists. “It’s how we were really.”
The protests were “the first minute, really, when I felt I didn’t want to leave”, she says. “I wanted to stay because I felt that now we had a chance. And if we didn’t take this chance now, we would lose forever. Doing something was better than staying silent and staying in that system forever.”
Assad, of course, responded with increasingly shocking levels of violence, plunging Syria into a state of bloody chaos that still exists, eight years later.
At Hamza’s makeshift hospital in east Aleppo, al-Kateab was initially part of a group of “10 very, very best friends. We were two girls and eight guys living together, eating everything together and sharing everything.” In the first year, 2013-14, three were killed, but instead of weakening the others’ resolve it hardened it.
While the regime was spreading death, al-Kateab and Hamza were affirming life by falling in love. This made things “more complicated”, says the filmmaker, “because he was married before. But we felt like we shared the same path and that we could be stronger with each other.”
They could have left Aleppo and started a new chapter together in safety elsewhere, but losing friends had made them feel that they’d reached a point where there was “no turning back”, says Hamza. “It would be like their deaths had been for nothing. It would be like, ‘Okay, we’re fine. We’ll leave.’”
For al-Kateab, the worst part was knowing people who’d disappeared because they’d been arrested and detained by the regime, such as her “great activist” cousin, Mohammed al-Omar, who gave her her first camera during the revolution, or like their close friend, media activist Abdulwahab Mulla, who as kidnapped by Isis. “We knew they were probably dead, but all the time we had hope that they would come out. So we needed to be able to tell them that we stayed and were working; we didn’t forget, we didn’t leave Syria and start our own life – we were still fighting. This, for us, was very important.”
The hospital should have afforded them relative safety. However, they’d known since the bombing of Dar al-Shifa hospital in Aleppo in 2012 that even medical points were targets. People coming for help knew too, says al-Kateab. “So when a patient or an injured person came to the hospital, they were like, ‘treat us as soon as possible. We want to leave’ or ‘give us the medicine and we can go home’.”
We knew they were probably dead, but we had hope that they would come out. So we needed to be able to tell them that we stayed and were working; we didn’t forget, we didn’t leave Syria and start our own life – we were still fighting. This, for us, was very important
A permanent and ubiquitous presence at al-Quds, she filmed the injured, the dead and the dying (a lot of them children) as they passed through. “I was like the hospital staff,” says al-Kateab. “I used to see these people, I used to engage with them, and I used to expect myself or Hamza would be like them one day.”
Bodies, living and dead, became a regular sight, but as much carnage as al-Kateab saw and filmed, it never became routine. “Everything you see, even if you saw bigger before, it still affects you like the first time,” she says.
Just before Putin’s intervention in the conflict, al-Kateab and Hamza had made the difficult decision to have a child because although the situation was bad, they didn’t think it could get much worse. Sadly, they were wrong.
“From when the Russians started in September 2015, it was very clear there were no limits,” she says. There had been bombing and massacres before, and Isis had had a brief, three-month presence in Aleppo, before being forced out, “but we thought the situation was under control, or it could be controlled, and that this regime could be ended at any moment ... when the Russians came, the balance was very, very different”.
As the attacks intensify in the documentary, her voiceover gives a heart-wrenching insight into the bleak direction that war pushed her mind. In one scene, she admits feeling envy for the mother of a dead boy because she also died in the attack that killed her son, and didn’t survive to have to bury him. Al-Kateab wasn’t always proud of how she felt, but she was determined to be honest.
“Even if there were things I hated to say or speak aloud, or hate myself for feeling, I felt this is my experience as a mother, and this is what all mothers experience.
“There are a lot of things I felt ashamed of feeling when I was there, but that’s what happened and this is what people need to understand, that all the mothers and all the people, like even Hamza at one point, had these feelings, but didn’t want to say them out loud. I didn’t want to shy away from that; I really needed to make the film as real as possible.”
Some people have criticised the couple for taking Sama back into Aleppo on the eve of the siege in 2016, rather than leave her behind in Turkey with Hamza’s parents, who they’d been visiting when they heard what was about to happen. However, some decisions only make sense in the context in which they’re made, and this was arguably one of those.
In Ghouta, the siege had lasted for five years, says Hamza. “So was it better to leave Sama and not see her for five years? Maybe if she was of school age we’d have thought it was better for her to go to school, but she was seven months old.”
And what if he and Waad had been killed? “Is it better to leave an orphan in this world with her grandparents?” he asks. “We decided we will share the same destiny – die together or be together.”
So was it better to leave Sama and not see her for five years? Maybe if she was of school age we’d have thought it was better for her to go to school, but she was seven months old
Al-Kateab admits that they thought about the different permutations of loss constantly. What if he died? What if she died? What if one of them died with Sama leaving the other behind? “There were traumatising things in our minds all the time,” she says.
“We never slept apart and we never left Sama alone in the room sleeping,” continues Hamza. “We were always together so that if something happened, it would happen to all of us. We were in a very, very dark place.”
When al-Kateab finds out she is pregnant a second time in For Sama, her despair contrasts with the joy she felt the first time. Because of the siege, they didn’t have any fresh fruit or vegetables, and were unsure whether the hospital would even have any supplies by the time she gave birth. It was a confusing time.
“In this situation, you can’t understand what’s going on and how big or how small it is. Even with ourselves, I didn’t know if I should eat something or I should give it to Sama. Whatever you did, you would be wrong in one or another place.”
Happily, following their evacuation in December 2016, al-Kateab gave birth to a healthy girl, Taima. En route, the pregnancy had worked as a cover for the filmmaker to smuggle out her invaluable footage on 12 hard drives hidden inside a backpack that she wore over her stomach, beneath a winter coat.
Since leaving Syria, al-Kateab and Hamza have been outspoken about the murderous destruction being wrought by Assad and his Russian allies. So far, attempts by supporters of the regime to smear them have been limited to a few tweets suggesting Waad must have been part of a terrorist group in order to be able to film, while Hamza has been accused of not being a real doctor. They were expecting more, and assume that this unlikely to be the extent of it.
“We knew that the regime, not just at the beginning but at the end, murdered family members of some of the people that were famous in the revolution,” says al-Kateab. “So we knew that they would stop at nothing. I will not be surprised if I see someone here trying to attack us in the street, or in any place.”
They won’t be silenced, even if sometimes they feel like they have no more strength and are about to break down. They have each other and know that when things get rough, they’ll always have someone to pick them back up. One day they’ll have time to grieve. For the moment, though, their focus is the Syrians still under attack by Assad and the Russians.
“What we went through is something very hard, very tough, but it’s nothing,” says al-Kateab. “We have survived. We are okay. We should look at others more than ourselves now.“
There is a public preview screening of For Sama in Curzon Cinemas, Soho, plus a Q&A with directors
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