“For Sama": SXSW Grand Prize Winning Doc Is A Hard Watch About Syrian War [SXSW Review]

SXSW’s documentary grand jury prize winner comes hot off the heels of other powerful documentaries about the Syrian war, those include “Of Fathers and Sons,’” “Last Men in Aleppo” and the upcoming Sundance-winning “Midnight Traveller.” However, directors Waad Al-Kateab and Edward Watts’ “For Sama” might be the most poignant. not to mention the hardest watch out of any of them. Waad documents her last five years in Aleppo with the kind of intimacy and unrestraint of a true artist having to capture the essence of a impossibly bleak situation. Not only does Waad first-person narrate the whole thing, addressing her daughter Sama, but she manages to film everything and I do mean everything. Her camera is there when life is taken and when life is given, it’s an exemplary work of art in the midst of near apocalyptic times for the Syrian people, who have to manage both the invasion of ISIS and, even worse, the constant bombings by the Russian airforces on a daily basis.. Pregnant with Sama, Waad isn’t sure if she should go on about bringing a new person while she lives in Allepo, a city which quickly became the most dangerous in the world, according to many geography experts, but Waad goes on with it, and her revealing home video footage turns out to bring us the most fully-fleshed document of the Syrian war thus far. The horrific imagery from the hospital, where her husband resides as a doctor, is impossibly grim, but what Waad creates with “For Sama” is a historical document that will be re-watched for years to come and will bear viewers to ask the same question over and over again: where were we and why didn’t we help?