For Sama: The True Cost of A Revolution

The African International Film Festival (AFRIFF) kicked off yesterday and the first movie previewed was Waad al-Kateab’s “For Sama”. “For Sama” is a documentary showing the female perspective on war.

Present at the glamorous opening event, which held at the Filmhouse Cinema, Landmark Retail BLVD, Victoria Island Lagos were Minister of Information and Culture, Alhaji Lai Mohammed.

Also present was the Vice Presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party in the 2019 elections, Mr. Peter Obi, and several industry practitioners including President of the Association of Movie Producers, Mr. Ralph Nwadike and veteran filmmaker, Mahmood Ali-Balogun.

“For Sama” is seen through the eyes and camera lenses of Waad Al-Kateab; a young Syrian woman who lived in Aleppo as it became a chief battleground in the Syrian civil war.

Al-Kateab made the documentary in form of an intimate love letter to her daughter, Sama; hence the name “For Sama”. It resembles a sort of diary chronicling her experiences throughout the war.

The documentary spans over a period of five years, from the early uprisings and all through death and destruction. In these five years, she falls in love, marries and gives birth to Sama, as the world falls apart around her.

Al-Kateab was in her final year studying economics when the war started. She started filming on her phone and ended up becoming a journalist offering a unique paradigm of the war.

Al-Kateab said she started filming as a way to bear witness to the truth. Initially, everyone around her was apprehensive about it. But the turning point came when two of her friends were killed in a Russian airstrike.

Thereafter, she was called upon to film all the time, to tell the story of a revolutionary people that did not want to be forgotten.

The cost of a revolution

The war in Aleppo began when Al-Kateab was a young student and a warrior for social justice. She had no problem risking her life to stand with Aleppo. Her husband, Hamza, was the same.

But once Sama was born, everything changed. In her words, Sama’s birth brought “joy laced with fear”. She began to have second thoughts about staying in Aleppo for the safety of her child.

Hamza Al-Kateab is a doctor. He worked in the hospital in Aleppo, caring for the wounded. But when that hospital was bombed down, he opened his own and went on a mission to save as many lives as possible.

A lot of the documentary took place in the hospital. Every day, people would cart in victims covered in dust and blood. Hamza would fix some, but a lot of them would leave in body bags.

The most shocking part about it is that many of the bodies were those of children. The war was especially heavy on the mothers who had to bury their own children and the mothers who feared it would soon be their turn.

It was then that Waad al-Kateab had the internal struggle of whether to continue in the revolution or to flee for her child’s safety. “Will you blame me for staying here or blame me for leaving?” Waad asks in her poetic narration.

To abandon the revolution was unimaginable because it would mean everything they had gone through, all the lives they lost would have been in vain. Hamza could not bear it, and neither could Waad.

Once, during a raid, Hamza asks Waad to abandon Sama because she has a better chance at surviving if no one knew her parents were a doctor and a journalist on the rebel side.

The suffering was intense and we got to intimate ourselves with their condition. But in the thick of it, there was still hope.

Hope

In Waad Al-Kateab’s footages, they are sprinklings of joy. In the middle of airstrikes, her friends joke, “The daily bombardment soap opera, featuring your favourite bombs, shells, and missiles.”

Babies are born in the middle of the war. People sing louder than the sound of the bombs. Children paint burnt buses and go swimming in a makeshift pool. A boy wants to become an architect so he can rebuild Aleppo.

In the end, it is the hope for the future and the determination of the people of Aleppo to keep their joy that makes them survive five years of war.

Although harrowing and horrifying, the images captured by Al-Kateab show the strength of the human spirit and the value of freedom regardless of the cost.

Waad Al-Kateab and her family have since left Syria. “For Sama” won multiple awards at the Cannes Film Festival in France and has recieved high praise from critics for being the first female account of a war.

Watch the trailer below: