God be praised! She wanted her grief witnessed.”Last week – three years later – a small girl skips along the corridor of a photographic studio in north London, holding the hand of a babysitter. The moment comes to comb her hair: Mama must do it. What else can she find, looking back, that is positive?“Death was close. The first step is “understanding”, she says – especially at a point where Idlib’s suffering is starting to resemble Aleppo’s. She describes him as having the gift of making her feel safe with “a constant smile on his face”.
The moment comes to comb her hair: Mama must do it. Al-Kateab asks in the film: “Sama, will you remember Aleppo? Al-Kateab agrees but explains: “It’s about care. “They’d turn up and five minutes later, the place would empty. She talks about filming and family life on the frontline“This is insane – we’re getting this every day,” she goes on in her low, musical voice – her calm as abnormal as her situation (during the siege there were cluster bombs, chlorine gas, barrel bombs and air strikes). It started with hope, descended into despair. We watch him at work: a confidence-inspiring hero – his makeshift hospital run, extraordinarily impressively, partly on willpower.
That’s why there is so much joy in the film. They dance to Willie Nelson’s Crazy and Hamza tells her: “This is the road we’re taking, it is a long road full of danger and fear but freedom waits for us at the end.” The tenderness of the dancing is offset by what is, in a sense, their most dangerous wedding vow: “Come, let’s walk it together.”In the early days, friends would tease: “They’d say: Waad’s playing with her camera again…” This changed after one of their dearest friends, Gaith – a nurse – and his brother Mahmoud were killed in an air raid.
All rights reserved. I tried to go to the Syrian embassy for help, but they wouldn’t help, because My passport, Hamza’s passport and Sama’s passport were almost expired, and once that’s happened, there’s no option to get another passport, so I had no option but to leave. Hamza was recognised – as manager of the only surviving hospital and responsible for civilian healthcare in east Aleppo’s last besieged quarter – to be one of the most significant figures in the civilian administration area and it was he who received the phone call from the UN with a message from the Russians to say that if those remaining in Aleppo wanted to survive, they must surrender and go into exile immediately. They hold him upside down and shake and slap and, just as we have given up on his slippery, grey body, he opens his eyes and cries – and everyone who sees it will join in. His furious frown is a triumph, his cry defies Assad (they save the mother as well).
The issue of the bombing of hospitals (with the film as evidence) has also been raised at a security council meeting. That’s one of the advantage of what we went through: You can’t complain.Hamza is working for a company that provides banking in conflict areas. This, they realised, did not work. And whenever I hear a very loud sound – like a train – I feel it in my body. Al-Kateab worries that nappies and baby formula will run out. At first, she had felt adamant that showing the worst was what mattered: her footage was “evidence”. Waad Al Kateab, who is from Aleppo, walked the red carpet of the 92nd Academy Award just one week after winning a Bafta in London, with a message written in Arabic on her dress for the world to see. Parents worrying about the safety of their friends and families and trying to put down roots. But it has been a very different experience to what I expected.
Toddlers use a bombed bus as their playground, painting it all the colours of the rainbow (even little Sama is helped to wield a brush) and al-Kateab’s stoical best friend Afraa never loses the twinkle in her eye as she keeps quiet about weevils she finds in the rice. Or the value of minutes. Hamza is a close friend but married to someone else. Better than her mother, who says: “I still suffer from nightmares. They live in the hospital that her husband, Hamza, has started from scratch. You need to find hope everyday when you wake up, and with children you just keep going for them.After ‘For Sama,’ a Syrian Family Finds Refuge in LondonWaad al-Kateab and her daughter Sama in Aleppo, as seen in the documentary “For Sama.”From left, Taima, Waad and Sama al-Kateab with Afraa Hashem and her daughter Naya al Altrash, who also featured in “For Sama.” Waad and her family visited Afraa and her family in Turkey in August this year. Al-Kateab says audiences come to her moved and energised and with one question: what can we do? Attentive and warm, she pats my arm to emphasise her points. They slept in their witches’ dresses for the whole week.We had a really hard time after we left [Aleppo] with Sama.