for sama (waad al-khateab, edward watts)

It’s impossible not to react to For Sama on a visceral level. This is a visceral film. As visceral as anything you might ever see. Babies are born. Babies are brought back to life. People die. More people die. People’s faces are ripped open. Limbs torn off. Blood. Blood on the floor on the body in the bed in the street on your soul. The poetry of blood. War. Encrusted dirt on children’s faces. Death. Real death. Not the kind of death you see in the movies. Not the balletecised death of Tarantino. Not the “realism” death of Saving Private Ryan. Real stinking obscene death, the line between something that breathes and something that has nothing left to do but decay and rot. 

The music in the cafe where I am writing is excessively jaunty for this time of the morning. Someone next to me says that someone they know “is meeting PJ Harvey today and I’m like send me pictures of PJ Harvey”, and all of this seems perfectly inappropriately appropriate for writing about this film. Because the flip side to For Sama is that we have to value our deformed reality, no matter how much we might love or hate it, because just over the hill lies the equally human reality of hell. Which is what Al-Khateab’s camera captures in Aleppo. A descent into hell.

Where we learn that hell isn’t all bad. There’s still tenderness and solidarity and beauty, even if that’s only the beauty of blood. The red that the narrator says has infiltrated every corner of her life. The reasons for living, to keep on keeping on, are irrevocable, on every day that you wake up knowing it could be your last, or worse, the last day of your loved ones. At one point in the film, Waad says that she was envious of a woman who had died before she had to see her child die. Because there is nothing worse than that. Hell is a place where the gods play endless jokes. The miracle of a life spared, shown in the most astonishing scene in modern cinema, when a child we presume is dead is brought back to life, with a gasp which is also yours when it occurs, might also, for all we know, be a life taken away the next day, off camera. 

Hell isn’t so bad because it’s hell. You might even be crazy enough, like Waad Al-Khateab and her husband, Hamza, to want to return there. Hell is so bad because it will be the slow death of everything you love. 

There is no way to respond to For Sama except on a visceral level. To connect with For Sama, you don’t need to have been to Syria or walked the alleyways of Aleppo’s ancient souk, or even pretend to care about a war that is still taking place, day after day. The only thing you need to have done is to have been human, at least once in your life.