This film was nominated at the 92nd Academy Awards for Best Documentary Feature. It's one of a half-dozen, nonfiction films to be recognized at the Oscars that have been about the Syrian Civil War. The Syrian Civil War is a multi-sided conflict that started in 2011 and continues today. It's considered one of the deadliest conflicts in history. Estimates of a third to a half-million people have been killed. It's also resulted in the near total destruction of the city of Aleppo, which now mostly lies in bombed-out ruins. About a dozen documentaries have been created about this catastrophe and the bombings in that city. Half of those documentaries have been nominated by the Academy. Each of those docs have presented a different perspective or point-of-view of the conflict. This film provides the perspective of a mother with a newborn baby, pondering whether or not she should stay or leave because of the horrible prospects of raising a child in a supremely, deadly war zone.
Director Waad al-Kateab lived in Aleppo during what's considered the Battle of Aleppo, one of the major military confrontations that lasted from 2012 to 2016. Waad was just coming out of school. She attended Aleppo University. She would later become an Emmy-winning journalist for Channel 4 in the United Kingdom, reporting on the Battle of Aleppo. She began though with reporting and videos on the protests of the Syrian government that preceded the war. She eventually fell in love with a doctor who was a political activist that decided to stay in one of the few remaining hospitals and deal with the casualties of the war. They got married and had a baby daughter whom they named "Sama." As the death toll and devastation increases and becomes worse, Waad has to figure whether or not she should get her child away from this danger and possibly out of the country.
The harrowing nature of Waad's film begins right away. She starts with a close-up shot of her baby with sounds of bombs and bullets occurring in the background. A lot of the footage that Waad provides are either domestic scenes in her home with her baby and husband or the footage is of her husband's hospital or other hospitals documenting the casualties that continually roll into the emergency rooms. She also documents the destruction of blocks and blocks of buildings throughout the city. One of her early scenes though is her desperate to find her baby in the chaos of the hospital hallways in the wake of bombs and airstrikes causing death and destruction. It's thrilling and highly emotional.
Waad crafts scenes that are similar to that over and over. Those scenes are thrilling and mostly heartbreaking because she is not shy about putting her camera on the corpses and the casualties who are severely injured and blood-soaked. Many of those victims are children and many of those corpses are children as well. Waad again doesn't shy her camera away from it. Her camera is even up close to an almost stillborn birth. It's not only heartbreaking for sure but disturbing.
The constant question is why does she stay. She has a child that like so many in her camera lens could be killed in an airstrike, bombing or random gunfire. Logically, not everyone or every parent can flee this war zone or country. The refugee crisis as a result of the Syrian Civil War is incredible and overwhelming, so many couldn't leave, but even if one couldn't flee the country, one would consider getting out of this city, which eventually shows no end to the violence and destruction. Waad and her husband named Hamza get that opportunity to do so, to get out of the city to possibly safer countryside. Yet, they return and they do so with their baby in tow. It makes no sense why they would willingly go back into that kind of danger and why they would bring their child back into it, especially since Waad herself has documented so many children's deaths.
I'm not sure that the film does a good enough job of making sense of Waad and Hamza's decision to stay. Intellectually, Hamza is a doctor and his skills are desperately needed. Waad is a journalist whose skills are certainly needed too. Both obviously believe in the political revolution that fueled the war in many respects, but, beyond that intellectual understanding, I never felt why it was so vital for them to stay and bring their child back into it.
When it comes to personal insight into either Waad or Hamza, I felt like there was much lacking. In retrospect, I suspect a lot of that vagueness about the two of them is for their protection. It's suggested at the end of the film that she and particularly Hamza were targets of the Syrian government. The details of which are fuzzy and never really made super clear. Yet, before all of that, it's never really made clear as to why Waad and Hamza fall in love. Waad didn't seem to document her courtship with Hamza or much romance. This is perhaps a cultural thing or a sense of modesty about sharing that part of her personal life, but it remained a disconnect for me.
Rated TV-PG.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 35 mins.
Available on PBS.
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